New Mod Tools, Brief Cloudflare Status Update

[Zephyrus]

Update on CF Situation: Cloudflare ended its maintenance of its billing system on the 8th, last Friday. Unfortunately, there are still issues with @Holo's account. He had attempted to pay several times over the course of the downtime, never with any success. This apparently has caused issues with his account. There has been communication with Cloudflare, but it has been abominably slow. Last we have heard, Holo's account had been referred to billing. It is our hope that this will be resolved sometime this week. I can assure everyone that we have backup plans in place in case that Cloudflare does not work out but we've not reached that breaking point yet.

Moving on, last week there was a heated but incredibly civil (I’m pretty proud of you guys for that!) debate on the goals and methods of moderation on MD. We had been talking about the need for more effective moderation tools on MD for months, but the debate spurred the dev team to complete additional tools.

These tools will increase efficiency, increase consistency of moderator action, will make life much easier for the sole forum moderator (that’s me folks :v), and will hopefully decrease the overall level of drama due to moderator action.

The first tool will hopefully excite a lot of users out there. If you look in your settings, you will see a dropdown for “Comment visibility”. The two options you can choose are “Hide moderated comments” and “Show all comments”. In short, you can either choose to view comments that have been tagged as moderated or you can choose to not view them, in which case, you will simply see a small line that says “This comment has been marked by [Insert mod here] as moderated” when reading a forum thread or a chapter/manga/group comment thread. The point of this tool is to give users a way to opt out of the "hugbox" if you disagree with our moderation goals. This feature is for registered users only.

Next is the actual moderation process, which has had a few small changes. The first is that mods now have the option to tag a post as moderated. This will make the post subject to the above toggle in your settings. If a post is tagged as moderated, you will receive a PM that looks like this:

Moderated posts are essentially for minor infractions of 5.1 and its related rules or spoilers outside of designated threads and forums. Further disciplinary action may or may not follow a moderated post, depending on the severity of the violation and/or the user's posting history. A mod may not tag a post as moderated if they feel it is not warranted. You may simply receive a warning in thread, which is what the vast majority of my actions as a forum mod have been.

Lastly, there is now a rudimentary system where I can now view a user’s moderated and unmoderated comments, as well as the total number of moderated comments a user has. This will enable me to see if the user has a history of rule breaking as well as give me better context why a post was reported. Hopefully this will address concerns that moderation is lacking consistency.

Please feel free to post any thoughts or questions you may have!

 

[Teasday]

help holo is keeping me locked up in the php factory send help

Don't unmod me!

 

[ichigoteguz]

Great solution to a big problem IMO, I lean towards free speech but understand that some filtering may sometimes be required, giving the individual user the ability to decide if they want to see the content or not is perfect, it neither takes the hard line censoring route, nor allows unbridled chaos, thanks for the great job dev and mod tam.

 

[dskilly]

ey, that's pretty good ! Thanks for the hard work!

PS. typo on the last sentence, "posts" should be "post",

Spoiler

just a grammar nazi passing by Xd

 

[VawX]

My slow brain thought that it was a tool for modification, like mod in game, and I was like super confused mmm...

So far the community is pretty in toxicity, but I don't comment and read forum as much now so good to know the moderation can be better from now on mmm...

 

[cryum]

Moderated posts are essentially for minor infractions of 5.1 and its related rules or spoilers

My immediate response is to have a label that says whether the infraction is 5.1 or spoiler without having to view the moderated comment, but I'm not sure if that's deliberately unstated.

 

[Zephyrus]

@dskilly
Dang! I usually read my posts several times before posting. I guess my deep, dark secret is out: I'm not perfect. 😅

 

[Arashi89]

Maybe it's just me being paranoid, but I'm afraid that Cloudflare is being intentionally slow in answering the issues with the payments as a way to pull the plug on Mangadex. I know it sounds stupid, but I've heard of certain cases where sites get shutdown because they refuse to process payments for the servers, and I'm wondering if it might be the case for Mangadex too.

 

[421cookies]

Cool.
Can I get this comment moderated? I don't think I would have any more chance since it's quite unlikely for me to get into argument or something.

 

[Holo]

@Arashi89

That would be shitty if it is what's happening to us.

Regardless, I have contingency plans for that scenario, so don't worry too much about it.

 

[RecycledCabbage]

Having a hidden weighted system for each user for each post s/he makes sounds like a solid plan. Each person would have to be conscious and think twice before leaving a post that would certainly spark certain "interest" towards other users.

 

[Anonyan]

That's a fantastic solution to a problem that was barely a problem in the first place. Going out of your way to please everybody should be proof enough that you care about guiding the community that already exists instead of forcefully creating a new one.

 

[Darkion]

@Anonyan this is a growing community/forum. If you are managing a growing group, you need to set in place rules and strong systems so I doesnt shit itself to the ground, reporting is also useful for banning spammers accounts. Heavy moderation sucks, but anarchy can also be bad.

 

[Anonyan]

@Darkion Yeah, no shit. What's your point? I said it's cool that they're adding a cool feature that pleases everyone, why are you replying to me as though I said they should remove all the rules?

 

[anki09]

This is nice, I always hated when discussion n debate roll off into personal attacks. The comments regularization seems pretty balanced as far as I can see. Thank you Mangadex staff and the people who were in forum for working on this!👌

P.S. Press F for @Teasday

 

[LadMan]

Cool, thanks for the update!

 

[BobaTheFett101]

Yay! 😀

 

[Darkion]

@Anonyan sorry my lack of sleep made me mess up what i read.

 

[ichigoteguz]

Anyone remember Spy Kids 1?, those things imprisoned by floop would sing this kids show song that backwards was "Floop is a madman help us save us", I get the feeling that any day now we'll start finding easter eggs around the site with @Teasday 's muffled cries for help.

 

[PervySageChuck]

This is Pervy's sister using my idiot brother's account to post this.

Unless you wish to hire a professional assassin, you need not worry about my foolish brother's lewd, crude, rude and generally obnoxious comments. Just try to take pleasure in the knowledge that I, (and my trusty baseball bat), will continue to teach him the errors of his ways EVERY time he starts typing at his keyboard.