Ask the Mods Important Site Questions (V2)

Are you serious?

@Ponies And Cuddles
Yes.

That can’t be right.

@Ponies And Cuddles
it is right.

@Mikey
@Ponies And Cuddles

I don’t know if this is relevant, but Ukraine-themed pics keep attracting angry Russian trolls who kept calling Ukraine “fascist” or “murderer”.

We could report them over whenever they show up, but can you do something about these anons?

I also want to know, why are they so obsessed with hating Ukraine?

@HorsesandMuchMOAR
We are banning them as soon as they are found or reported, so please do report them.

I already made the reports that alerted you earlier. Also, I tried to “bury” the comments with my comments that are more relevant to the pic.

E.g. the troll, at one picture of a birthday party (>>2934212): “Donbass Ukronazi Donbass Donbass”

me: “the shading and lighting look simple, but the Ukrainian apple juice is a homely touch”, about the quality

Is the troll’s IP blocked?

There are multiple people, and getting another IP these days is beyond trivial. Unfortunately, hateful mongrels have an absurd amount of energy they choose to channel into being shitty people rather than anything productive, and the most effective tools against them ends up being the most blunt and simple.

Would it be alright if I make pony fanart themed after Ukraine or Russian culture?

I support Ukraine and I hate Putinism, and I just like the cultures.

@HorsesandMuchMOAR
Yes, of course. Just don’t make or imply any comparative or negative value statements about real life peoples or cultural groups.

Oh and since some troll or pearl clutcher is almost certain to go off at any new Russia or Ukraine related art, be sure to not respond to comments that are rude or hateful about real people (including those who made and uploaded and engaged with the content) or are trying to stir up an argument—just report them quietly.

I usually try to avoid politics cos that will attract trolls. Some political memes like Роисся вперде (read: Roissya vperde) aren’t political to me cos they are funny.

Where the gardening forum?

Using SQL and Python, I dug up some 40-ish forum spam comments, oldest of them are from 2013. How should I report them? I can PM the list to any mod who wants to tackle them.

I’m sure there are more than those 40, it’s just that Derpi has over 5 million forum posts, and no matter how you filter them, there’s always too many left for one human to review. The most effective filter is to remove all posts made by users who have made more than one forum post or image comment, since most spammers only make that one spam post. The second important filter is to include posts that contain an off-site link. That second filter can be refined by whitelisting numerous “safe” domains, like common news sites, Wikipedia, etc. Combined, those two filters yield wonderful results, but there are still too many for one human to check. They have to be manually verified, you want to minimize the number of false positives.

@JP
Thank you for doing that.

If possible, post them all into the text field of a single report. That way they’re in the tracker and everyone can look at working on pieces of it.

Once you do that, I’ll convert it into a new report under my name so you don’t lose the report slot.

@Ciaran
Gigantic report sent.

Report claimed. I’ll start work on it tomorrow. I’m ostensibly at work today.

Can one of the staff check in on the badge thread and the artist tag alas thread? I don’t know if the people who normally look into these threads are busy or not sorry.

The threads just haven’t been checked in by a staff member for a whle now and the lst of posts are getting bigger.

Could some mods start emptying my report queue? The site’s been under some pretty heavy fart spam and .mov spamming for the past few hours. I can’t even report them all, there are so many of those comments.

Blocking all (true) anon commenting right now would be a very good move (registered users can still post as anons), then going through everything anons have posted in the last 3-4 hours and purging all junk would be the next very good move.

@JP
Sorry, I duplicated and closed the report that I’d grabbed that you logged for me. I’ll work that in the background, and you should have a spare slot now.

@Ciaran
Thanks, that helps a little.

I’m guessing this’d be the right thread to ask. >>2959234 was deleted for Rule #3. But from what I can glean, that image was made by the artist uniquely for (and based off of) the text included. Can’t tell who the uploader was from the page.
EDIT: The Fluttershy wasn’t in any of the other artist’s posts either, if that helps.

@Brokedownandmadeone
The uploader replied to a question about the image saying they just threw the image on it so that they could upload the text.

Do you have a link to the source for the image? The image was fine and would not be a problem if it was uploaded, but given that the post itself was a “Wont let me post text without a pony on it” it seemed like a poster child for “obligatory pony”.

@Ciaran
Off of a quick search, I couldn’t find anything.
Found the source post though, and it’s only linked to derpi. No clue where the flutter x anon pic came from otherwise.

@Brokedownandmadeone
Hmmm … there is this >>2802030 … you may be right, I’ll restore the image.