Report site bugs here

@Background Pony #D42A  
There’s no use trying with them. As you can see with @Background Pony #C3AE and @Derpy Whooves reply they would rather just ban you and act as if the ban was justified than have any sort of civil conversation about any of this.

@Derpy Whooves  
I never said you were anything more than that, or rather, i was trying to give praise to the fact you were dedicated to answering questions, and were answering them to the best of your ability.
 

 
It’s hearsay, but apparently there are folk who’ve only downvoted a single image and have been hit by it and there is someone in this thread who feels they’ve been unjustly shadowbanned, so uh, there may be some bugs in the ‘targeted’ part.  
Or people are lying, i dont really care much either way apart from not condoning the entire concept of shadowbans in general.
 

 
Oh no, by ‘rearrange’ i was referring to doing something on the technical side of things to highlight important wide-reaching notices with a big red star or something else more appropriate for whatever notice system you all use that screams [READ ME], so the first time you realize something has been implemented isn’t when a user comes to you with a problem.  
So, more work for your techie i guess.

@Background Pony #C3AE  
We would rather not ban you (actually, it would be nice if people could just get along and not be assholes to each other - that’s the ideal) and are trying this instead. If you personally would PREFER to be banned, that’s still an available option. We just really would prefer that people stop breaking rules.
 
PROTIP: Having an opinion doesn’t break any of our rules.

@Background Pony #B75A  
There is a giant red star (or the equivalent) on any profile that had this done to them. Again, as soon as I know WHO is asking, I can see the answer. It’s right there.
 
But I still won’t be able to speculate whether OTHER users who are talking to OTHER users are just having a normal problem, if they’ve been outright banned, or if they were hit with this new thing.

I apologize for posting this in this thread since it seems to be the wrong forum and topic for this, but I have no other idea where to post it, and since it seems to be a current topic at the moment I’d just like to give my reply.
 
I’ve always tried my best to stay apolitical in what I do and how I go about my art. I just believe that my art should speak and stand out more than the artist behind it, and I also believe that others are entitled to think differently. That being said, I would rather you ban me than shadow ban.
 
I downvoted images that I didn’t really enjoy for one reason or another, with no attempt at mass-doing anything. I just simply came across them and voted how I felt about the picture. If that broke a rule, whether intentionally or unintentionally- You should just ban me.
 
While I do enjoy sharing my art on this site, that doesn’t exempt me from the rules.

@The Frowning Pony  
The system seems to be malfunctioning as my friend @CaNoN says he only downvoted one picture yet he got shadowbanned

@Derpy Whooves  
Right, but you apparently had no idea the shadowbans were even implemented until you went to that users page and/or the admin themselves weighed in on this issue.  
I’m saying the staff should have a notice board, news ticker or whatever else would be appropriate in your mod tools that would indicate [READ ME ASAP] regardless of whether the person is not paying attention to the standard run-of-the-mill notices at the time.  
But this thread is for discussing site bugs, not your internal communication, so i’ll stop posting about it now.

Without singling out anyone in this thread
 
In any given thread, we really do ask that you post as yourself, or anonymously - never both.
 
If you are one of the people switching between Anon and Named posting, please pick one.

@Xppp1  
Their numbers are off; that said, I’ve disabled it as it does seem like a false positive.

@Background Pony #B75A  
I don’t need to know that before needing to know that.
 
If someone who had this applied to them had asked, I would have looked at their profile and there’s the info I need.
 
If someone says someone they know has a problem with an image but they don’t know which one I ask them to ask that person to report the image and describe the problem they’re having.

@Derpy Whooves  
I said, I would prefer that you warn me or leave this alone. You should be warning everyone. If you absolutely insist on issuing a ban, do it, take responsibility for it. But it is completely unnecessary, as is this “feature” which cripples the site. You claim having negative opinions is allowed, but since you’re blocking downvotes, deleting images, and disabling comment sections left and right, your actions say differently.
 
Cut the ban threats. Work with your userbase. You’re good at that when it comes to site features, except this inane downvote rule. This is just another restriction on a feature everyone’s made it clear they don’t want restricted. Remember when you all tried to remove the downvote button? How did that work out?
 
For the record, even if I downvoted only the BLM images that I believe to be poorly drawn and ignored all other negative qualities- even such obvious antagonism as the artist directly cussing out their audience- it would still be a high enough number to likely set this off.

@Background Pony #3AF5  
Warning everyone that’s been mass downvoting these images is a waste of time; literally, we don’t have the time, and a large number, if not the majority, of those warned would take it as an incentive to continue.
 
Rules #4 and #6 have been codified for years and we’ve generally only needed to apply the latter when we spot really anomalous voting statistics mostly related to multi-account voting. In this case we took a look at the votes on certain tags and found users downvoting the totality, or near totality of the tags, as well as users with very little site activity other than to downvote (and often post on) those tags.
 
What we’re seeing is a very clear case of a number of people refusing to use the site’s filtering system, refusing to follow the site’s rules, and focusing instead “downvote bombing” a set of images they could wholly hide via their tag filters, or via the individual image hiding feature. We’ve spent years being extremely lenient on enforcing certain site rules, but the aggressive, and mirthful, rule breaking we’re seeing now is forcing our hand.

@The Frowning Pony  
I have to agree with most of the people on the site right now.  
If you pass an Ideologically driven policy that only favours a small fringe group of people and negatively affects those who questions it. You’re going to get backlash no matter what. We cannot pick and choose who’s ideology is better or more moral. Either all of its ok, including Antisemitism which by the way…you guys have no rules against. Or none of its ok…which would include BLM artwork (which by the way BLM as an Organization is Anti Israel and is funded by big DNC Money) If you want to end this quickly, its easy, allow for both Anti and Pro BLM artwork, or dont allow any controversial artwork, including BLM stuff .People should be allowed to question and criticize, no man, no king, no God should be free from Criticism.

@The Frowning Pony  
I told you. I told you over and over. I didn’t downvote bomb anything. I’ve given out much more indiscriminate downvotes than this, and I still wouldn’t have considered those “bombing”. The only votes I gave were dependent entirely on my opinion of the image in question, not of the tag applied to it. I choose to see all images, to hide nothing and only spoiler a few things, because I want to evaluate pictures individually. A large number of images within a specific tag failing that evaluation is not indication of rule-breaking. Unless, for some reason, you might just want them not to have a negative score, and the rule is a convenient reason you can use to further that end?
 
Are you actually going to claim that you could not possibly have announced this change, implemented an automatic warning before someone hit the threshold, or given one manually if that’s how this effect is applied? You put in the work to do it, but not to tell us you were doing it. And your explanation is “it’s too hard”? “We had no choice”?
 
You had every choice. You chose to work against the site’s users rather than with them. That was a mistake, one it is not too late to fix. I would advise rolling back this change, sending a notification to all users it’s affected, and if you ever plan to do something like it again, publicly announcing your intention and asking for community feedback before you implement anything, as you have with virtually all site functionality changes before. You have done a complete 180 from your usual level of communication in regards to these BLM-related changes. How can complaints about that possibly be a surprise to you?

Shouldn’t this belong in the other thread?  
I thought this was for reporting site bugs

@John Sheppard  
We’ve deleted several pro-BLM and “ACAB” images. We don’t publicize deletions, and there doesn’t appear to be people going off-site to make a fuss out of those images being removed or proceeding to spam us with edits of them. Our “ideological stance” in this matter is primarily based around minimizing “trolling” and its effects on the site and its users.
 
 
@Background Pony #3AF5  
As has been said before, if you want the filtering on your account reevaluated, report yourself and someone will look into it. If you’re finding so many images under a particular tag to be meeting your disapproval, it may be time to use a filter to spoiler or hide them, or being using the individual Hide image function.
 
People have been very competent in using the site’s filters to cull out images of fetishes, ships, characters, and even things like anthro or humanized in the past, and this really should be no different.

@icey wicey 1517  
As of right now, it seems the Admins themselves are having a bit of a bug…a brain bug. Cuz it seems they’ve become Religious and are trying to spread and promote their new faith by taking down and censoring and shadow banning people who dont agree with their new found Orthodoxy…one based in Race and Identity. And now a I have over 40 artists calling for a new Site that treats everyone fairly and equally.

@The Frowning Pony  
About those ACAB images. Is the Rarity one still up? Because I think that falls under the category of deliberately antagonizing and insulting a massive number of people. When I last checked about an hour ago, it had not been removed.
 
Personally, I am very anti-censorship, be it from people in favor of or in opposition to Black Lives Matter. You seem to have a different perspective. And I notice you aren’t responding about the fact that you made this change without announcing it. And you’re not even discussing the possibility rolling it back or adding some kind of notification to it. Can you tell me that I wouldn’t be banned if I sent this report you’re asking for? Because that’s the only change you and the other staff have shown any inclination to make.
 
I don’t hide images. Literally any images. I spoiler a grand total of one artist, and I’m still fond of one of his pictures despite hating 99% of his work. This is because I don’t categorically dislike any images. I want to give them a chance. And at the risk of repeating myself, it is not my fault that there have been a large number of BLM-related uploads recently which are outright antagonistic or portray MLP characters in a highly OOC way in order to demonize others, and which therefore earn a downvote I would normally be hesitant about giving. Since these pictures are so often claiming that “no reasonable person” would ever dislike what they’re saying or doing, I believe the right to speak and contradict that claim is a rather valuable one. However, downvotes seem to be the only means of doing so on most of these pictures, because someone has locked down all the comment sections.
 
At what point will you acknowledge that this has never been about just having a hard time enforcing rules- and furthermore, that all this new enforcement is incredibly targeted?

@Background Pony #3AF5  
You’ve had very little activity on the site for months until this past week, and nearly all downvotes landed on the same pool of images. In fact, in the last month, you seemed to have downvoted 32 images, and 30 of those were BLM related.
 
That doesn’t point to the sort of activity you’re attributing to yourself.

@The Frowning Pony  
I’ve been very involved here on several occasions in the past, as you can no doubt see for yourself, and this is hardly my first period of inactivity. Forgive me for becoming active again as a result of suddenly spotting a lot of extremely vicious pictures among the new uploads. And how many images have I upvoted? More than I’ve downvoted, definitely. Did those stop in the time I was less active- for which the reason, by the way, was that I was more involved on other sites and didn’t have much to be concerned about here? Moreover, do you think my increase in downvotes might just correlate to the massive increase in aggressive mouthpiece images within the past week? Of the images in the BLM tag, the majority were uploaded within that time period. You’ll also notice that this isn’t my first time downvoting a large number of related pictures at once, and likewise, I didn’t downvote every single image within the tags the other times either.
 
Still not hearing an answer about the Rarity image, the lack of any communication prior to or during the change, the fact users have never liked having downvotes restricted to begin with, the almost entirely one-sided nature of the new policies, the lack of ability to convey criticism through constantly locked-down comment sections, the likelihood of me being banned rather than having this penalty removed if I follow your instructions, the possibility of turning back any part of this change, or several other points that I and other users have brought up.
 
Do you even want the community’s honest opinion on this? And if you ask for it, will you actually let all users speak? A poll, a feedback thread, a public announcement, something better than just accusing people of brigading and rule-breaking, please.

@Background Pony #3AF5  
A number of your questions have been addressed in another thread and I tire of repeating myself in the same thread nevermind multiple.
 
As for your voting patterns, we can only see what we can see, and that’s that the near entirety of a tag was downvoted with almost nothing else touched in the space of a week. It’s practically a textbook scenario for what the policy is meant to address. If you absolutely still do want to see those images, then I imagine you can log off to have a look without the temptation of downvoting a content matter you know you don’t like, or wait a while for all this ruckus to pass.

@The Frowning Pony  
Direct me to that thread, then. Stop refusing to cooperate with people because it requires work. Oh, and I seriously doubt you stated in that other thread whether I’d be banned for using the problem-solving methods you yourself have suggested.
 
And you can see my upvote patterns just fine. I can see them, so it seems pretty unlikely that you couldn’t. You’re just focusing on one thing I did so you dump me into a category and implement a terrible blanket solution, one which conveniently only affects people who disagree with you. Have you even looked into my older downvote history for the other cases I mentioned where I found myself doing something similar, for entirely apolitical reasons, and no punishment was given? For proof that I’m not part of the brigade you so desperately want to blame for any opinions you don’t like? Does this new system even affect non-BLM tags, political ones included? Will you be doing these investigations into people who dump downvotes on Aryanne pics, or Anontheanon uploads?
 
You say “we only see what we can see”. What I’m observing here, though, says you only see what you want to see.

@The Frowning Pony  

 
Something in my gut says this is a less than temporary solution, especially when it’s coming from you. (or your mouth if you’re speaking for someone else. Covering my bases.)
 
@Derpy Whooves  
Query ‘’‘resolved’’’ but for answering the question the only thing i can reasonably assume that isn’t bog-standard Derpi is likely any custom filter in use (and thus isn’t the problem given that the Everything filter also works.)  
By the way, what’s the point of having an Everything filter if you’re just gonna Shadowfilter[tm] people at a whim anyways? ‘Mass downvoting’ appears to (still) be a rather nebulous term, ya?
 
@The Frowning Pony  
How do you get a false positive on a manual system?  
How?  
What?
 
@The Frowning Pony  
Don’t you have a global and user-specific banner system that you could apply and then go from there instead of silently doing it? Sure, it wouldn’t get to everyone ever (t. has the banners filtered out) but it’d certainly be a step towards transparency. w/e. I have lansaga to consume and ponies to judge the artistic merit of, irrelevant of actual content, and then tinting such judgement with how egregious the content is. Have fun disabling tags at a whim for folks, or whatever it is you actually do.

@Boxless  
The list was the result of a complex query; in that sense it was automatic and the query may not have been perfect. However there is no system that automatically flags a user on voting.
 
We do not at present have user/role specific banners. From our experience running banners for site downtimes and OC collaborations, people seem either completely blind to them, or become extremely annoyed by them.

@The Frowning Pony  
If your query can be faulty perhaps double and triple-checking impartially that things are actually dodgy is a good idea. There’s the high likelihood that a user is downvoting the images because the tag is filled with things that, in their eyes, are not particularly high-quality.
 
…And yet the system still exists and has not yet been replaced or rendered obsolete by a better one. Might be a good idea to use what you have instead of quietly doing things behind the scenes when it affects something so important as the main feature of the site.
 
 
God i fucking inhaled that pasta sauce cake, holy shit.