Anyway. So, it seems that the biggest beef is that not only was it a giant wall of flags, but it looked very clearly like it was entirely just a wall of "Every comment containing the word 'edit'".
Which isn't always something to action on, and having them sift through the mess is just a bother. As well it disregarded context, so for example an exchange that goes like "Hey, did you account for X?" that is responded to with "I have edited to account for X", deleting the latter only leaves an unanswered comment, while deleting both may remove potentially useful data (sometimes, the inquiry for clarification is signal of its own).
As I expected, in some cases near the end, actions were taken near the end even though the flag was rejected because even though the approach to flagging wasn't agreed with, there was still things that should be done, so action was taken but the decline was indeed to send the message of not to take this sort of "shotgun" approach to flagging.
Comments are low priority compared to most things. The highest priority dealings with comments, which are spam and offensive, can be handled swiftly. It's by design as it were.
I'll reiterate that doing 100 flags, especially after having the selection of declines and that I've delivered the message behind said declines is in fact related to the bulk and the methodology behind the flagging, is not all that helpful to actually getting things actioned on.
but everybody on these teams should know how I am by now, I have no issues doing 200 edits in a day, they shouldn't be surprised when I submit 100 flags.
I don't think the two are quite comparable since one is an action type that has its results performed, while the other is a request for another's action. What makes for a comfortable and manageable volume differs.
Comment flagging could be a community tool against the often rough tone on SO. However, the current comment moderation system isn't suitable for the purpose. It's not useful for anything but the removal of really outrageously offensive stuff. That's because it's almost completely opaque:
There ...
It's fun when you're one of the people that usually reviews these things and you still get no response.
But better to have something out there. We check on these things. Things which are long old, not much spoken of, or even declined, we do get to implementing.
We've got well over 5000 obsolete comments on Arqade. Since these cannot be handled using any of the user level tools, I have been flagging these so that they can be actioned by a moderator. Unfortunately, our moderators don't appear to appreciate this effort in keeping the site clean?
All of th...
apparently I'm on my third warning and potentially facing a suspension, after getting an aggressive and insulting meta post from a mod that claims I'm doing this for the flag count and to cause trouble
even though it's provable that cleaning stuff up is basically what I do
yeah take your time, I'm a little upset and think this is being handled wrong but I'm handling myself
@GraceNote I will bring this up here instead of there until I can compose myself to write it up without all of the emotion, but as you can see from the screenshot in my meta post, I only used the script as a basis of where to start after you said "don't flag everything with edit in it" (paraphrase)
So this comment:
"Do not flag based purely on naive keyword searches. If I thought a simple keyword search was sufficient to remove these comments, I would remove them en masse and cut out the middlemen."
It's not completely valid, when you look at how many flags I raised per question:
I checked every single thing I flagged lastnight after our conversation to ensure I didn't leave any instances where I was flagging "edited" of "please add this into your post", like we discussed
@kalina The best thing to do, right now, is just enjoy the sites. You mentioned poking around the network to see if we had stuff in other areas of interest - that could be fun. Answer some questions on Arqade, that's always fun - so is helping new users get to learn the ropes. The obsolete comments really should be part of a more organized cleanup, unless you just happen on them opportunistically.
@3ventic The review process being lost is a fault here, and part of that is because of the limitations of the flag queue system. If you pick out of a list of 500 comments that all have specific keywords, the moderators still get a list of 50+ comments that all have specific keywords, which doesn't give any illustration that the situation has changed. — Grace Note33 secs ago
This is basically what I was meaning to say before I got pulled by FEichinger to discuss comments in general. It isn't visible that you did any change to your flagging pattern, and even when we reviewed the flags, it still looked pretty much the same. That's why we acted as we did - the changes to your procedure are entirely invisible to us and we still see the same thing we saw before.
@kalina What I would recommend is that you take those scripts, take the numbers you get out of them, raw and post-analysis-filter, and make a list of the comments and post it on Meta or somewhere else. Bonus points if you group comments of similar ilk together with reasonings behind their suggestion for removal.
Nope, because when I look at the posts in the screenshot, I see a number of comments containing "edit" or "thanks" equal to the number of flags you raised.
I'm feeling quite misunderstood, too, because "Number of flags per post" wasn't remotely the issue.
The issue was "Flagging a bunch of things based on keywords, enmasse". 80 flags on 20 posts is still 80 flags. They're bunched up in the UI but it's still 80 flags.
It was one thing I mentioned in a series of lines explaining why this kind of flagging isn't helpful.
Again, I'll assert that when I took a look at the list just now, I saw an equal number of flags to the number of comments that contained keywords. If there were some in other parts that didn't contain the keywords, that got lost in the mess caused by the first, which brings us entirely to why this approach is bad in the first place.
@ManishEarth Your little app makes me wonder if we should block all caps titles in the quality filters. I'm just sayin' - I didn't realize there were so many of those coming in
Good that you're doing a post to organize this - it's kinda hazardous to work with comment flags in a sort of organized front without a physical plan ready that can be reviewed and previewed.
@GraceNote this is all I ever wanted to happen, all of this drama from today has annoyed me and some of the comments made have seriously upset me when ultimately I just wanted to clean shit up.
@ManishEarth would you be ok with us using charcoal for this cleanup effort?
@Undo In light of the recent posts, why not speed up work on my initial idea of converting Charcoal to a "better place" for comment moderation, where normal users valid/invalidify things and mods do a second check and can script-delete
> We're actually thinking of blocking this script from functioning any further on our API.
@GraceNote If you want I can disable the app for now
@Undo basically, you find one "possible robo-review", and then the script looks for more by the users who approved it. It finds more bad reviews that way and propagates
You take a seed bad review, and look for controversial reviews (multiple decline+accept on on review) by the same user. Ask the operator to validate the review (were the approvers wrong?), and if so, feed that into the machine too
Don't know exactly what the logic would be like, but I have spent a lot of time doing automate-able review bot digging
