The Slacktiverse

All of that said, trolls are a problem. I linked to this site from Slacktivist, which might not seem like a big deal because Fred Clark had already done so himself, but all of a sudden the trolls came in.

Including one who has seriously reached the point of being in favor of damnatio memoriae* in his case. Because he was the one who devoted months of his life to bringing down Typepad Slacktivist by making life hell for those running it, finally gloating when it closed, because (apparently) he simply had nothing better to do.

Trolls are ready to make racism and victim blaming into a joke. And while my thread has been swept clean of them because, under the current control your own thread standards it was within my purview to do so, they're also notably misogynistic. It was my thread they were trolling their but they made sure to make their attacks on what I was saying flow through attacks at the commenters with female names.

If I were christine the cynic perhaps they would have felt more comfortable attacking me head on rather than randomly attack me by shooting through others who happened to be female.

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So, in conclusion, we need to do something. We can't have the situation be that whenever this site is linked to** we're suddenly beset by trolls we have only a patchwork of nonstandardized methods for dealing with while being limited by blogger's inflexibility.

But since I, personally, am not going to approve of a disqus based solution unless I find out the problems with it that can totally silence individuals no longer apply, I have no idea what we should do.

Those in favor of disqus have a good argument in support: It can work, it has work, we've seen it's flexibility.

All I have is: We need to do something, I don't know what, but I don't want it to be disqus.

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* It's basically, "Let the name of ----- be stricken from every book and tablet, stricken from all pylons and obelisks, stricken from every monument of Egypt. Let the name of ----- be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of men for all time," but in Latin.

** And we want this site to be linked to because hopefully we have valuable things to say.

I would so love an edit function.

Should read:
"Including one who has seriously reached the point of me being in favor of damnatio memoriae* in his case."

Little words, just a couple of letters but leave them out and sense is not made.

And "at least one person who doesn't want to use it at all" should read:
at least one person who can't use it at all.

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Tired today.

A good question.

I don't personally know of any other third-party commenting engines. And a major problem is that Google *does* keep changing their API, so any solution we implement with Blogger would need to be a current, evolving product. And I only know of Disqus for that.

The TBAT were able to work miracles on Typepad because they -- Mmy, I believe -- had massive technical experience that the current moderation team (to my knowledge) simply doesn't have. So it's a problem without a good, easy solution, I think.

I was wondering about this too. We need a system where IP bans are possible, for sure, but it doesn't sound like Disquis is really workable for a lot of people.

The commenting options on Google are:
* Anyone - includes Anonymous Users
* Registered User - includes OpenID
* User with Google Accounts
* Only members of this blog

However, turning off anonymous commenting would not solve the problem. To the best of my knowledge and Googling, there is no way to ban someone from a Blogger blog unless we make the board private, invitation only -- which means that new readers won't be able to find the board.

If people would like to suggest new solutions by name, I know the entire moderation team would appreciate the suggestions. :)

Random idea:

We could have two boards: one publicly open, with commenting turned off, and one private, with comments. The public one could also have a message along the lines of, 'if you want to join our community, message such and such and we'll give you access to the commenting board'.

Then we can link to the public board while controlling comments on the private one.

I don't know if the posts from the private board could be automatically synced to the public board, but it might at least be worth investigating.

Kind of like how we had "under the cut" at the old board? But with invitations? That's a really interesting idea, ZMiles!

I think syncing could be done... at least, it's possible to automatically email a post when it goes live to an address and it's possible to Post By Email, so maybe we could match those up... It's *really* worth thinking about. I find it very compelling and original, honestly.

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Alternately, we *can* move again. This was set up because we had a time limit on Slacktivist, with the money running down, and we have more leisure time now to research boards.

I really like this idea. Really really like. Also, would comments on the private board be in a private place away from the prying eyes of google? That would be really super nice. Maybe I could even have a name again if that were the case. A unique, slacktiverse-only name, but a name nonetheless. I miss having a name.

I think maybe wordpress offers more solutions for moderation than blogger does but don't take my word for it because I really don't know.

If enough people like the idea, I'll set up a private test board tonight and see how it works. It's possible that Google may limit how people can post there, or it may just be a private sign-in, after which one can still post as Anon.

FWIW, we can't even *view* IP addresses right now, and would need a third party tool for that, like a stat counter that ties comments into IPs.

I seriously like this idea, though. Several heads ARE better than one!

Personally, and this is purely just me talking about how I feel, I think if the split boards allow us to work around the inability to ban, Blogger comes out slightly ahead of Disqus--the increased number of people unable to access comments is worth not being able to edit. But that's just me.

Because of the unique nature of this community, I agree. I don't think this Private + Public setup would work well for traditional blogs, but it sounds like it could work very well for our community.

I'm willing to do the work to get this set up if that's what people want. Should we start doing "+1"s?

Though now I say that, I realize we still don't have a lot of weigh-in yet in general, as most people aren't back home from work and things. Maybe we can leave this as an open question and I can work the code out on Saturday if that's the community will?

+1 from me on that technical solution, and on waiting until at least Saturday to see if this is the community consensus.

Question: Is this thread solely for discussing the technical issues, or do we want to discuss the moderation policy itself as well?

I say both.

Oh, and the only reason I'm not including rule 6 is because I think it only applies to this thread.

I would agree that having a policy as strict as Shakesville's could make it harder to bring new people onboard. I like kisekileia's ideas.

The biggest problem I have with carding -- and it fell out of use on Ramblings very quickly -- is it means that someone has to actually keep track of all these offenses, and that's a lot of overhead.

Plus it ultimately means that bad faith people get more passes than they should (what I call "'three more offenses before we can finally ban Johnny' syndrome") and good faith people lie awake at night worried about that one black mark on their record.

I'd honestly be a lot more comfortable with the "soft" safe space policy described here if we left bans up to moderator discretion and private discussion. We're not looking to banhammer people posting in good faith, and setting up a carding system creates the impression that we are (and, again, pushes an undue paperwork burden on us since now we have to keep a list somewhere and add to it every time someone transgresses. That's a lot of coordination given that there are currently already 5+ of us and more every week).

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But one thing I will NOT compromise on, and that is that people who do not use the Oxford comma shall be perma-banned on sight. (/joking)

Re: Mirroring - It might create administrative headaches and more work, (boo), but if it were feasible and easy, would a checkmark that says "I do/do not want my comments mirrored out to public space" make it workable? (And them we'd have to think of how to signify that someone doesn't want to be mirrored, so we're not accidentally exposing people who don't want to be shown. Yikes. Now it sounds like a lot of work.)

I think the only feasible way to do mirroring of comments is to have it done in an automated way, and I don't think there's likely to be an easy way to mirror some comments but not others, both for tech reasons (it's probably an all or nothing thing) and also for coherency reasons. If there's a comment thread with 3 people who don't want to be mirrored and 3 people who do, and they're all talking to each other, and only the mirrored comments get posted on the other site, it will be a confusing conversation to follow.

But don't make the decision about mirroring comments or not mirroring them solely based on me. If comments are going to be mirrored into a public space, then I'll self-edit my comments to strip them of stuff i don't want google to see, just like I do on Ana's blog, just like I did at old slacktiverse, just like I do in all public spaces I inhabit. If comments aren't going to be mirrored, I'll still self-edit to the level of information I'm comfortable sharing with people I'm at varying levels of familiarity with. I'll be fine either way. That said, if a /lot/ of people don't want their comments mirrored, then we should go with that. But if most people don't care, then mirroring it should be.

Ana, you have a good point about the carding system I suggested being too rigid. Maybe a more general policy of "trolls will be banned; people who say problematic stuff in good faith will have their problematic posts spamtrapped and be politely educated, within reasonable limits" would work?

and I don't think there's likely to be an easy way to mirror some comments but not others, both for tech reasons (it's probably an all or nothing thing) and also for coherency reasons

I'd add complexity of quoting to the mix.

Say you've got a system where commenters A through G are all engaged in conversation and E isn't in public. So instead of the public seeing E's comments they see [Comment Redacted] or whatever, the problem isn't just how that works on the tech side and how easy that conversation is to follow for an onlooker in the public. The problem is that any or all of A, B, C, D, F, and G might have quoted E, as I have just quoted you, which means that even with E's comments not showing up in public, fragments will be preserved in the works of others like ... *resists making a classics metaphor* and those quotations won't stay on the private side.

In theory a system might be coded up to recognize quotations, check to see if the originate in a "not-public" account and then redact those too, but in practice I assume such a thing would be a lot of work and risk either being overzelous (redacting non-quotations and thus mangling completely public-safe posts) or under protective (missing quotations that contain sensitive information) or even both at the same time.

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I'd certainly like you to have a name again, but I think you're right about feasibility.

I don't see anything wrong with people doing that for personal safety, but we can't really moderate to that. The moderators still have to read everything that goes on the board -- many of us have comment notifications directed to our emails -- which means that triggering language can still affect us and we can't just put someone on private killfile and not think about them again.

And unless there's a plugin to show that "100% of users are ignoring Johnny", or something, we have to do something if Johnny is breaching whatever safe space guidelines we come up with. Now, sure, if we decide that, I dunno, QUATLOOS is off-limits to say but SKWIRL isn't, then people who are distressed by SKWIRL can still be safe here individually if they install whatever Firefox plugin lets them killfile Barbara. But that would be separate from the moderation policy re: QUATLOOS.

Or am I saying something that everyone already knows? Possibly I am.

Not having any experience with Discus & Blogger (beyond "I know how to post a comment"), but being generally tech savvy, it sounds like what you're suggesting should be theoretically possible. Whether it's actually possible depends on whether Discus/Blogger have an easy option to make it happen, or whether there's a 3rd party tool that could be installed to do that, or whether someone in the community has the technical expertise to write a tool if one does not exist (and if necessary, maintain it when blogger changes their api which seems to happen more than occasionally). But, in theory, it shouldn't be impossible.

I suspect that any problems will be less "we are too incompetent to do that" and more "the locked-down software doesn't let us do that" - after all, each site owner really wants you to be using its own system exclusively.

Yeah, I opened with "may be physically impossible" for a reason.

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That said, I probably should be more clear about one thing, not that it'll change the "may be physically impossible" aspect.

I wasn't thinking of trying to integrate blogger and disqus in a way that it's blogger for the user and disqus for the moderation, I was thinking of using Blogger's option to include an HTML/JavaScript gadget (what I use for *checks* my Amazon search box I guess) to be used for the comments the user sees, where our own code in that gadget (and by "our own code" I mean that of someone who knows what they're doing, not me) called to the hidden disqus and converted that thread to what it displayed. No importing back into blogger. Perhaps no commenting from blogger either if it were within our capacity to make our own comment box which then automatically sent the inputted comment into disqus.

All of that said, in addition to disqus not being designed to do that, having just taken a look it it doesn't seem like blogger is set up to let you arrange the layout of an individual post page, only the blog as a whole. What the hell?

When I go to layout I can screw with the layout on the main page but see nothing for what appears on the pages of the individual posts (they use the main page layout) and regardless I see no way to add a gadget in line with the posts, instead it's header, sidebar, and footer. I was thinking of an inline gadget immediately following the post in the post column. That gadget would be what actually displayed the comments.

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All of which is meaningless if, as it appears, disqus doesn't work that way, but I like people to understand what I'm suggesting even when it is a dead end.

When I go to layout I can screw with the layout on the main page but see nothing for what appears on the pages of the individual posts

Then again, I am using the simplest template available, maybe that has something to do with it.

Thank you for weighing in. We want to hear from lurkers as well as commenters. :)

You remembered correctly: I don't like the Wordpress dashboard, as I find it tremendously unintuitive and I like the blogger "drag-and-drop" style of adding widgets and custom code. This was germane when we were under the ticking clock to get things set up before the Typepad site went archival. But is significantly less germane now that we have all the time in the world and plenty of people onboard capable of doing the setup.

Migration, at this point, would not be too difficult; we only have maybe two dozen posts so far here.

I do not know anything about IP banning at Wordpress and whether it can be done with the free flavors. But if we have a Wordpress adept here, I welcome them to speak up! :)

I'm OK with a somewhat fuzzier policy. What matters is that it's not too hard for multiple people to interpret in a reasonably consistent manner, and that it doesn't provoke too much argument.

Thanks for the information on Wordpress. It sounds like even Wordpress.com has a lot of really excellent options that Blogger doesn't, probably enough to justify moving there.

That does make moving to Wordpress sound like a pretty attractive option. If we do, however, it generates a little bit of a problem, namely that the Typepad site is now set in stone to redirect here. Unless there's a way to set this page up as an automatic redirect, it'll probably confuse some people.

Though on the other hand I haven't checked our stats in a while. Are we still getting a lot of traffic from the link on the Typepad site?

Ah, one question I don't recall seeing answered, though I'm running on short sleep and high stress so I may have just missed it: Does Wordpress allow anonymous commenting?

@Froborr:

Sort of. At least, all the wordpress blogs I've commented on require you type an e-mail address and a name, so I use a (consistent) throwaway e-mail address and type Anonymus. I do not know whether there is an option for the kind of Anonymous that blogspot allows, but I'm happy with the wordpress anonymous commenting situation as I understand it to be.

Dreamwidth allows completely anon commenting (but the default can be changed for all new entries and also on a per entry basis). It also allows IP logging (which can also be turned off)

Another possibly non-feasible tech solution to this problem:

At Dreamwidth, we have a "cross-poster" that allows for the dreamwidth account to specify other LJ-type sites (since they share a codebase - I don't think they can do other blog services, because of the custom markup language, but I could be wrong) to post all their dreamwidth content to. So if you have friends who are still at LJ that you want to see your stuff, you set up the cross-poster to post to LJ. (Yep, it's another mirror. But wait, there's more?)

The nice thing about it is that someone can add a footer text to all cross-posted material that only shows up on the cross-posted site. It could say, for example, "Content originally posted at Slacktiverse-on-Wordpress. To post a comment, please go to [entry URI]". Comments could be turned off at the destination for the cross-post, allowing content to live there for people to see, but forcing everyone who wants to comment to go to the spot where the tools allow for the moderation control we want.

If such a thing could be done (through plug-in or a script of some sort), it might make moving easier - the TypePad redirect lands here, where there is content to read, posted regularly, and if people want to comment, it's a short hop to the final destination. The active people will eventually just skip the intermediate steps, or people will update bookmarks so they can just enjoy reading the content here on Blogger.

Ooh, here's a possibility:

1) Turn off commenting here.

2) Set up a Wordpress blog.

3) Post every article to both blogs.

4) Put a hard-coded Comments link at the bottom of the Blogger version that links to the Wordpress comments.

It's a little bit more effort-intensive for authors than just straight-up moving the site, but I think less effort than the split board, while retaining all its advantages.

*thumbs up*

And now I realize my brilliant idea is exactly what SilverAdept described, just worded slightly differently. Sorry.

I don't mind. It's a great summary of my meanderings, and assuming there's a WordPress plug-in somewhere that can handle the posting to Blogger and the hard-coded URI back to WordPress, then it would be quite easy to implement.

We're not stuck at this address forever; Google provides the ability to edit the blog HTML directly and we can put in a redirect:

http://www.webupd8.org/2009/06/how-to-redirect-your-blogger-blog-to.html?m=1

One of the many reasons why I chose Blogger way back in the day. I'm pretty sure it still works fine and hasn't been changed by the API changes; I can set up a test sometime.

We're not stuck at this address forever;

Well, that's good.

I would vote for #1.

Thank you for doing this.

I agree that #1 is the course that seems to have the best immediate impact. #2 might be doable, but I would say it's best done with the help of someone who can make WordPress go.

I think #2 is the best long-term, but it requires someone with WordPress skillzortrons.

If #1 works, that's the most convenient for me, so I think that's the one worth trying first. And yes, thanks!

I agree with Froborr that #2 is probably the best option long-term, but we need someone who knows WordPress to help with it. Storiteller, would you be able to help us with the tech side of things on Wordpress?

I have set my test blog to private. You can view it here.

http://anamardolltest.blogspot.com/

Note that there's no way that I can immediately see to change the "no access" statement; I don't think I can modify it to say "email HERE to ask for access".

Probable deal-breaker: Google's "authentication" requires an actual Google *account*. When I authorized a Yahoo email to see the board, I was told that I had to either sign up for a Google account to seal the deal OR continue as a "guest" for 30 days. (After which the offer apparently expires and must be sent again.)

I think that's a pretty ridiculous system; there's no reason why Google couldn't use a login system that doesn't require a Google account, but then it wouldn't be sufficiently evil. *facepalm*

Incidentally, if someone would like to volunteer for a temporary ban at my Wordpress blog, we can see how that goes:

http://anamardoll.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/metapost-weve-moved/#respond

Froborr, I've banned your IP (I think) from the Wordpress blog. What happens when you try to post again? :)

I'd say Wordpress still looks pretty good, assuming we can successfully set up a redirect here.

I agree with kisekileia. I have Tuesday at home, and I'll look at redirection. I'll also capture some basic Wordpress templates and we can talk about accessibility. If that's what everyone else wants, but I think sacrificing some basic template control is better at this point than dealing with the insular, empathy-challenged jerk I just spam-trapped.

No, as near as I can tell, she didn't.

There are people who can remove your comments that don't have female genitalia, but I notice that you never go after such people.

Second, you're seriously trying to trick us into giving information that could be used to identify the location of a person who, if their location is identified, could be killed. And not just said person, but also person's children.

This is not fun you're having on the internet, real people's lives hang in the balance and you're putting them at risk. If someone, in a moment of weakness, answers any of your 20 questions attempts at more information real people could die.

You want to know how and why a certain course of action can't be taken in a specific situation, good for you. You're willing to cause the deaths of people to get it? Fuck you.

In the short time that this blog has been active there has only been one life or death situation to come up and it would be long since gone if not for your constant unrelenting push for that situation to end in death.

You want to know why your questions aren't getting answered? Because if they were people could very well die. Not abstractions that exist only on the internet, real people in the real fucking world.

Is that what you want? Because, if it isn't, stop asking. And if it is, fuck off.

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

The post in question stated very clearly that a social worker and a lawyer were already involved, and that the abuse had been conveyed clearly to both. Therefore there is nothing more to say about this, unless:

a. You're trying to trick someone into posting identifying information by pressing the issue further and demanding details to justify why the world doesn't magically work the way you think it does, or...

b. ...you're using this as a ridiculous straw-issue to justify your trolling as Righteous Anger, which is obviously better tasting and less filling than admitting that you're a vindictive asshat who enjoys it when anonymous commenters threaten women with grievous bodily harm under the guise of "concern".

As far as I'm concerned, this conversation is over; closing that thread was not an invitation to carry the argument over to this one. Further comments along this line will be deleted.