Addressing rule 4/6 abuse

Rexton the III

One artist, two tags

Hello,

I’ve asked before, but could someone please address the rule 4/6 abuse when it comes to fetish content. I post clean and fetish versions of my work that are constantly subject to people abusing these rules. This does not only affect me, but anyone who does similar content.

When one version of a picture has 5 downvotes compared to 50 on another version of the same picture, it’s clear that there’s 45 people who are downvoting based on content, most likely from viewing only the thumbnail, which is against rule 6. It is also clear that these people should be filtering said content instead, as per rule 4. Maybe they need some help?

I tag my uploads correctly and link a non-fetish version of the piece (if available) in the description. I don’t see what else I can do. I don’t want to force anyone to see this stuff, but it’s getting really old always being on the receiving end of this. I have talked to other artists who are interested in similar topics, but don’t post their work publicly for that same reason.

Here are some recent examples. And yes, they are all explicit and the alts contain scat, so be warned.

Celestia
Vanilla version
>>2932381
Fetish alt
>>2932605

Roseluck
Vanilla version
>>2917629
Fetish alt
>>2919122

Coco Pommel
Vanilla version
>>2908495
Fetish alt
>>2911202

Apple Bloom
Vanilla version
>>2869630
Fetish alt
>>2871900

Nurse Redheart
Vanilla version
>>2851234
Fetish alt
>>2854839

You can see a very clear trend here and you can pick pretty much any pair of my uploads (or anyone else who happens to have a vanilla and fetish version of a piece) and see the same. As downvotes aren’t public I can’t be sure, but I can imagine it’s going to be mostly the same users doing this.

Also, if I could tick a box to stop an upload from appearing on the front page, I would also use it every time when posting fetish content.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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The Smiling Pony

( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡° )

@Rexton the III
I haven’t been involved in a long while, but ~back in my day~, policy was to report any fetish/filterable content images that had a high number of downvotes and a mod would check if there are users that have an unnaturally high frequency of downvoting stuff they should have filtered (or in this case, intentionally unfiltered).

For a lot of “high impact” fetishes, the downvotes tended to be spread somewhat evenly between people systematically downvoting all the content, and “passer bys” that’d have little interaction with other such images but for whatever reason it shocked in particular (probably a bad search query during “me-time”…)

Anyway… yeah, reports and someone should look into it. As for intentionally hiding stuff from the first page, while I can definitely see the usecase, I can also very clearly see how this could be abused by bad actors.

Posted 1 years ago Report
Edited 1 years ago

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Rexton the III

One artist, two tags

Thank you for the quick reply.

I guess I can just report those, but it’s going to be pretty much every time I post. But if it’s not a problem then I can do that.

Yeah, I can imagine the hiding-from-front-page could get abused with all sorts of shit. It would need an approval queue or something like that, don’t know how heavy it would be to moderate, or implement.

Just making “grotesque” explicitly opt in could probably go a long way of solving it too. Like I get the idea of the “everything” filter, but people just use it because they are lazy but that also includes things 99% don’t want to see. At least they would have to understand that they have no right to complain if they are using it.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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🐴

IRL 🎠 stallion

Two drive-by suggestions:

Treat the everything filter as if all the images are spoilered regarding the downvote button on search pages. If you want to downvote from search pages, nopony enjoys absolutely everything: admit that fact and use some spoiler tags, at least.
Perhaps treat the “hide from homepage” box as a privilege to “trusted” users like the Fimfiction auto-approve story queue. Make it available to artists with “artist upload only” or “reassign upload credit” on their DNP list and ban their account if they get caught abusing the privilege.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Brokedownandmadeone

BigThirsty ponybooru.org

@Rexton the III
You aren’t the only one this happens to. It’s pretty much all images under that easily filterable fetish, even though I attempt to tag as thoroughly as possible on all uploads. Unless adding one happens to slip my mind which isn’t a common occurrence. Not much can be done AFAIK.

@PUBLIQclopAccountant
That’d probably be the best approach. Like a filter that explicitly warns you “this will show you things you probably won’t like. Are you sure?” and lists the last things that are no longer filtered. Heavy fetishes like scat, snuff, whitekitten, etc. Though I’m sure there’s at least a handful more that would qualify.
Or, the last tags could be listed there and have to be explicitly unhidden.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Background Pony #DE4F

~~Does the site record/allow moderators to see if a vote was placed from the thumbnail view vs. from the image page?~~
Actually, I don’t have any suggestion that’d follow up if so. Guess I’m just curious.

Does the site record/allow moderators to see what filter was in effect at the time a vote was placed?
If it can be seen that content-related downvotes come significantly from users set to “Everything”, perhaps voting could be disallowed unless you are using a filter that is not “Everything”?

Of course, a user can create their own “Everything” filter to continue to see all posts and restore the ability to vote - but perhaps requiring this extra step would spread awareness of the site’s policies and make a slight barrier for anyone who isn’t doing it on purpose.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@Background Pony #DE4F

Does the site record/allow moderators to see what filter was in effect at the time a vote was placed?

No, only the filter they are currently using, and whether that filter has the tag in it.

But generally speaking if someone is downvoting a particular set of tags, it’s pretty clear.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Grapefruit Face

Me & My Delusions

You know what really sucks? Seeing your art being stolen & badly edited and it getting no downvotes. You decide it’s time to crosspost your original from your DeviantArt account and within 11 minutes it’s already gained two downvotes… probably because it has an OC being shipped with a canon character. Smells like 4/6 abuse to me.

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@Grapefruit Face
If you report those we do look into them, and if it is SUS we do ban the people doing it and clear their downvotes. In fact, if you ran the math on all the bans on the site I’d be willing to bet most of the “Banned For Life” profiles were involved in multiprofile voting shenanigans.

That said, it can take WEEKS to run the math with some of these. I just this weekend finished one I’d been grinding on for almost 2 months, and someone else had been working for months before me. In the end, it turned out to be one person, with lots of profiles, carefully presenting each profile like a different person with different tastes - but in the end just one person behind all of it. They must have been using spreadsheets to keep track of it all.

That said, the site has a couple people who vote on nearly every single image that is uploaded. That in and of itself isn’t rule breaking - it’s actually impressive.

Just imagine it - profiles with votes in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions.

They gotta catch ’em all. And, for the most part, they do. They probably see more images here than most staff ever do.

Where this becomes a real problem of course is when we find artists downvoting their competition. That right there is where this becomes personal.

Anyway … don’t worry about reporting this one, I’ve got the image and am running the math on the people who downvoted it. But, in the future, reports do get looked at, and it can help us detect trends that lead to being able to do something about it.

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Grapefruit Face

Me & My Delusions

@Ciaran
Thanks, also where would I report downvote button abuse if I notice it again?

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@Grapefruit Face
Report the image for Rule #6 and in the text field say you suspect downvote brigading or abuse.

Posted 1 years ago Report

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Background Pony #DE4F

The limit of having 3 open reports makes the approach of “report problems” very frustrating and inefficient.

Doubly so when some kinds of reports can take months to resolve, such as the kind in discussion here. I know that Ciaran may note down a report and close it before resolution in order to mitigate the limitation, but I don’t think there’s any general policy for moderators to do this.

Whenever I bring it up, with suggestions to increase the limit or implement other ways to ease the restriction (like “in-progress” status not counting for the report limit), the response has always been something like 3 reports being historically optimal or that people will open too many reports otherwise (not as in report abuse - which is already bannable - but as in people ignorant of reporting best-practices in cases such as artist takedown requests). It comes across as disingenuous to be encouraged to report problems and then prevented from doing so.

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Edited 1 years ago

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LightningBolt

Senior Moderator

Undead inside

@Background Pony #DE4F
The reason for the report limit is to prevent report spam for frivolous/non-issues by users and making it 100x worse.

Unfortunately no perfect solution to allow more useful reports while also preventing report spam/abuse.

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@Background Pony #DE4F
You are also an exceptional super-user edge case. Most people report things that can be taken care of pretty quickly, normally within four hours on average.

But your reports often involve hours of research, contacting others and waiting for their replies, and even sometimes Excel spreadsheets.

Or, in some cases, dealing with the people or the situations you’re logging mean that whomever takes the report is going to end up in therapy or having to take a stress-induced vacation from the site for a month.

You log some hard things to handle.

It might be more prudent to just handle your reports as special cases, doing the same kind of “passing them through a staff member to re-log” like ive done with them, or just make you an assistant on the site so you can log things without the limit.

Reminds me of the old special class of super users we used to have back before the heightened security for assistants was added.

In all honesty, I don’t duplicate a lot of your reports because if I do then my name is on it. And if a report is in a staff members name, the rest of staff tend to leave it for that person to handle, so I end up being the person responsible for it. And lately I’m tending to have close to 30 or 40 reports or PMs in my queue all the time. I did 20 or so this last weekend, but I’m already back to three dozen pending reports or PMs, so me reposting your reports with my name in it is not a great way to get them processed.

Although, that would get them off your queue.

… let me think about it. There might be a way to communicate that the reports I’m re-logging to get them off of your profile are not actually reports I know anything about or am claiming, so others will free to grab them.

Or maybe, like I said, we should just add you to staff, if that’s something you’d consider.

Posted 1 years ago Report
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Background Pony #DE4F

@Ciaran
I didn’t bring the point up for it to be about me.

In this case, it was the explanation:
@Ciaran

That said, it can take WEEKS to run the math with some of these. I just this weekend finished one I’d been grinding on for almost 2 months, and someone else had been working for months before me.

…and I could just see, as if in a crystal ball, that it’d become a hindrance to the people being given advice, here.

But, upon reflection, I shouldn’t speak for others, I guess - downvote abuse is something I hardly pay any attention to or even notice, personally, so I don’t really know how often people would need to make reports about it. If they’re not running into reporting problems, then all’s well in this case.

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Ciaran

Senior Moderator

友情は魔法だ

@Background Pony #DE4F
Well, it’s not all well if you are still hitting your head on the report limit.

I honestly can’t see how many reports you have open from where I am right now, but if you’re maxed out and they aren’t moving please PM me and I’ll see what I can do to expedite at least two of your open or in progress reports.

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