@JP
The tools here are extremely granular, which gives the admins the ability to assign or deny tools depending on the individual volunteer’s experience with the site and the team’s experience with them.
But, anything that involves anonymity is reserved for moderation and administration - that’s the hard line between assistants and other levels of volunteers.
So, Assistants can only see that one off topic post on that one image. They can’t see who posted it, or see what else they posted. Only moderators and administrators can “see” what the anonymous poster has been doing across the entire site, by following things like the breadcrumbs left by their IP address.
This is where some people #insert insane.rant(freeSpeech,bigBrother);
Anyway. Usually one of us who deal with front-line moderation goes through everything that person posted, line by line, image by image, looking to make sure the individual comment on THAT image is really off topic (occasionally, they actually end up being complimentary to the artist, so even if the poster is a horrific spam monster we leave those) and making sure it wasn’t just some other anonymous user who coincidentally got assigned the same IP address.
Then you select each comment for deletion, and type in the deletion reason. And now you’re three pages away from getting back to the page where you can see what the next comment to look at was.
So it can be a lot of clicking. There’s no way to simply yeet all the comments by a poster. That might change, some people really wish they could simply “disappear forever” from the site, back to the beginning of time. So, maybe at some point someone will add that capability to Philomena, and then this site will have to decide if and if so how to integrate that into our processes.
Getting back to that specific ‘.mov’ individual, sometimes their comments are Rule #7 because they don’t seem to be able to distinguish between porn and safe images and comment about their pee-pee, which appears to also be their shame, on safe images. And sometimes its Rule #4 because they freak the fuck out when they see certain kinds of images. And sometimes its Rule #0 because they don’t seem to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy and sometimes start verbally attacking others who (reasonably) ask them to shut the fuck up, or state some negative opinion on the works of HotDiggityDemon.
But almost always its Rule #6 because they are so god damned unhinged.
And you read me right - we go through the comments one by one. One by one. Researching each comment, and making sure we document the right reason.
Even if it takes a couple of hours.
Because if we don’t research and document each one carefully, invariably someone else on staff doing an audit of deleted comments … which everyone on staff is able to do - including people who don’t do any front-line moderation themselves … will start a long conversation about why we thought some particular comment was NOT on topic for some particular image. And you can’t just say; “It was the .mov spammer”.
Because sometimes the swag.mov spammer will coincidentally end up talking about swag.mov on an image from the actual swag.mov. So even if you’re going through a hundred spam comments, you can’t just delete them all for being spam. You have to open each one and look.
Yes. Yes. If having to read every comment by an insane spammer sounds insane, that’s one of the joys of being a volunteer here. Everything we do might audited, so we might have to randomly defend anything we do ever. Even years after the fact.
This is why sometimes you’ll find volunteers seeming owly or otherwise grumpy.
Or drunk.
I seem to have gotten off topic. Excuse me while I get something to quiet the screaming of the chip in my head.
Better.
Anyway, if it’s a really big mess, then two or three of us will do it together. One works from the most recent, one from the most old, and another one or two people start in the middle and then go opposite directions until we run into each other.
The .mov spammer is … special.
I sometimes think it’s one of two things. Either someone’s incredibly poorly written bot, or some special needs child who saw SWAG.MOV and got their first boner and now is eternally going back to that same spot, over and over and over, making everything about that one moment of ecstasy, desperately hoping that someone else will share it with them.
They’re like Hal, from the movie “Brainstorm” - eternally stuck in the moment of ecstasy, over and over and over.
And when anyone else tries to talk to them, all they can do is talk about which pony was in which episode before and after which other episode, and SWAG.MOV. It’s so awesome.
For anyone who hasn’t experienced them, all their comments are of the type:
And now you would watch your friends revive discord in keep calm and flutter on and then turn twilight into an alicorn in magical mystery cure before swag.mov
Not until swag.mov
Maybe after that is chrysalis in a canterlot wedding, trixie in magic duel and then swag.mov
But not until a canterlot wedding and then swag.mov
And besides, rainbow dash saved you in sleepless from season 3 and so does telling her to get up in swag.mov
So … you tell me?
Bot? Or someone with some disability that leaves them stuck in one moment, endlessly, spinning in that single spot of their life forever. Always reliving that moment when they are simply playing the same tape, over and over in their minds, experiencing a moment of ecstasy over and over until nothing else matters.
By the way, if you haven’t seen Brainstorm (1983), I do recommend it.
It’s kind of a precursor to Lawnmower Man (1992). Except with Christopher Walken. And sex.
Mildgyth almost always has an answer that is both simpler, and more right than whatever I type.
@saby
Yeah - totally agreed. By comparison, some of the stuff assistants have to deal with on a daily basis is terrifying to me. I mean - have you SEEN what happens when a duplicate gets accidentally handled the wrong direction? Like, if the difference between two images is a single drop of semi-transparent semen three pixels large and THAT was why the images are different?
