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Simon Nolan added a comment - 05/May/07 06:27 AM
Please comment with suggestions about ways to make this work that may work better than described above!
Ten seems like a small number before a listing is pulled. I'm not exactly sure what number it should be, but definitely more than merely ten. A number large enough that it would be difficult for somebody to just get his buddies together and 'spam-out' a rival listing. Lots of people (try to) use the Events Calendar, and I'm sure many more would if they were given the option to flag spam.
If possible, chronic spammers should be subject some kind of disciplinary action. Not on the first listing- When reporting, you should have a small box as to "why" you are reporting - such as "part of a 24 hour unhosted yard sale". When sufficient 'reports' have been received regarding a particular 'event', then they are investigated by someone on the abuse team. Even if someone does get a group of people together to report rival listings, if there is clearly nothing wrong then the AT investigator can see that, and ignore the reports. It would presumably be easy enough to see if someone is reporting an unhealthy number of events for no real reason, and possibly have action taken against them instead. I wouldn't say they should be auto-removed simply because they've been flagged because that certainly does open the floodgates to abuse - especially as any individual can make 10 alts in a very short time.
I know a lot of people have more or less given up running events simply because of all the spam and crap that can be found there, making it almost impossible to find something that really is worth going to. If the events calendar can be cleaned up, then it might serve as something useful to let new residents know there's enough going on here that doesn't involve being paid L$2/10 minutes, and possibly to make the retention rate much better, and see that SL is the future of the internet. <i>I wouldn't say they should be auto-removed simply because they've been flagged because that certainly does open the floodgates to abuse - especially as any individual can make 10 alts in a very short time. </i>
That's why it needs to be more than ten. A hundred, maybe? There are tens of thousands of people logged in at any one point (though I usually check events on the website, myself) so 100 unique users flagging for spam could be easily accumulated without any coordinated efforts. Or even five hundred to a thousand--which would make it much harder for deliberate sabotage. Again, if more people knew they could flag for spam, more people would be willing to use the Event listings, so getting that many probably wouldn't be difficult. Craigslist still gets a little spam here and there, but it's stompled out of existence pretty quickly these days. (At least it is on the Atlanta list--YMMV in other cities, I suppose.) How many is enough? 10, 100, 1000? I don't see that it matters, personally.
I think anything like this needsa human behind it. Someone, somewhere can look at postings sorted by number of complaints and start at the top. Alternativley, I think a good idea would be percentage based. Rther than a set number of complaints, base it on what percentage of people clicked on the ad then went on to report it. What the percentages should be will be easy to find after a few days of testing... ooo new employment potential: spam taggers! Because after all, the rich SHOULD control what information is available to everyone...
Less than 100 reports would be extremely dangerous. Not including sanctions against false reporting would be seriously dangerous. And we'd need a Linden or volunteer army for administering this. Yes, the spam events listings are aggravating and do inhibit information sharing for everyone. But rather than filtering information as World defaults, why not provide user controlled filtering for Searches, with User-controlled defaults (i.e. opt IN for Mature, or Always exclude "SLingo")... We need improved user controlled Search options, not vigilantte or Majority rule on information sharing. No to this free gift for cyber terrorism!
No need to pay campers the Dark Side of SL will happily get every event run by the Gay Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender communities banned (just to give one example, atheists banning anything religious, Nazis banning anything mixed race, the list goes on) And NO NO NO to piling more work onto the over-worked Abuse Police. I oppose this concept vehemently.
It adds to the police-state mentality where residents are constantly being incited to report secretly on other residents. It provides more fodder for griefing and harassment. It enables rivals to spuriously abuse-report other people to sink their events. No, no, no to piling on work for Lindens to sort through the wheat and the chaff. If Lindens are sufficiently disturbed by the events list, they can police it themselves. If they can't take the time, then they have to let it be free. Those who suffer eyebleeds from things they don't like can use the filters. A less binary approach is to implement some kind of scheme for ranking events by interestingness. I suggest discussion of this topic occur in MISC-113, Event Listing Suggestions, a related topic.
I absolutely dissagree with the 10 votes making something spam. Ten votes is NOTHING. I agree with the idea of it being policed by an objective human. Either police it that way, or leave it alone.
I am not sure the auto-delisting is a good idea; it's just too easy to abuse, but I am giving this (and WEB-637) my vote to signal that some system for filtering (and possibly report abuse) is needed; the events listing is spammed into near-uselessness.
With LL's renewed focus on search and on a "predictable, controllable" experience, it is things like this which should be addressed. This is a wonderful idea, and I was going to suggest it if someone else hadn't. We have weekly events, but every time I've reviewed the events for that day to see how crowded out ours is with others, the events are about 90% spam. This, in my opinion, makes the events feature completely worthless, and I personally wouldn't use it (I see enough spam when I check e-mail).
As far as a "police-state mentality," that's how rules are enforced, and spamming in the events is one of the TOS rules that is completely ignored. Anyone who wants SL to be more community-controlled should really like the idea of the community having some way to say "this is spam and ruins our events feature" (except for those who contribute to the spam, of course, who will more than hate the idea). This was very usable because at the moment its unusable to find what you want
It's a real shame this issue seems to have died here. I know that probably more than 99% of SL users don't even know this site exists. If LL doesn't want to enforce some of their rules, they should remove the rules. The code for this change (at least on the website) would take less than a day. If I could insert images here, I'd upload a library of random visits to the Events page on the SL website; Sex Toys, Strip Club, Escorts... Looks just like any website that has an unmoderated, unreportable "Post Your Own Free Ad!" page.
I would have stopped wasting time reporting our events there a long time ago, but I don't want to be part of the reason the SL Events turn from 90% sex spam to 100%. |
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New Feature
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Add "Report this Listing as Spam" button to Events Calendar to allow community policing of the Events Calendar
