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3:59 AM

@bobble Wait how did you get banned?

in Grand Rounds, 33 mins ago, by bobble

I just tried to edit here to make the table-as-image a table-as-Markdown; this is vastly superior for accessibility (people who use screen readers, people who can't access imgur, etc.) However I have been auto-spam-banned for my efforts. A pastebin of my edited body Markdown-source. If anyone sees this, I urge you to apply my edit or a similar table-fying one to the question for accessibility.

There is a silent anti-spam process that makes anonymous suggested edits which it deems completely, definitely spam disappear into the ether - they never happened in the first place, according to all visible indications, even to mods!

I have quite honestly lost count of the times this has happened; it is more than 5 but less than 10

@bobble Okay so that was put in place by the company or is it like SmokeDetector?

Wow

Sad

It's an SE process, not Smokey

ell.stackexchange.com/posts/280325/revisions

This edit that I approved was later rolled back by the OP

> Special note for anonymous edits
Because a large proportion of anonymous edits are spam or abusive, anonymous edits are heavily rate-limited and there is an extra filter that checks all anonymous edits. If your edit trips the filter, it will be silently disregarded and you will be instantly banned from suggesting edits temporarily. If your edit was not spam or abusive (i.e. a false positive), or if someone else on your network triggered it, you can sign into an existing account and suggest your edit through it. (Note: the "edit history" link on the ban error message will just go to the ho…

Source

4:04 AM

Interesting. Didn't know any of that

It will never come up if you make an account to edit

@bobble Done. Thanks for the hard work! Btw subject-verb-agreement works better here

It was something about verbs, at least :)

Get an account Bob-ble!

maybe the rest of the site will be happy to have less necro-bumps for a week or so

4:07 AM

I don't know about that

Want to make a meta-meta post complaining on my behalf? ;P I've been thinking of asking about what, if anything, I could do to stop getting banned. Other than ceasing to edit tables-as-images into tables-as-Markdown. But that would mean making an account...

@bobble You mean ELL meta? But isn't this a problem on the system's part?

meta-meta = main-meta = meta-se

Oh sure, happy to do that. Any other things you'd like me to say?

oh, really? It's just a half-formed idea.

Someone's going to say "why don't you make an account"

4:14 AM

I mean I am happy to post that because my stance is clear on micro-contributions (I coined it): every little bit adds up

(to which you would say "bobble make an account" and I would sputter something unintelligible about "but I don't wanna")

Q: We need to be more careful with suggested edits from low-rep users

7

https://ell.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/100816 This edit'd have fixed at least one typo in the original question. Seems two reviewers both missed it. It is not easy for low-rep users to make edits due to the character count requirement. That is why a lot of proposed edits submitted...

Your cleanups are not micro per se and are quite helpful, but these things are at least as important as a HNQ post in my book

Someone's also going to bring up how most anon edits adding a large amount of content (they have no way to know how much content was originally in the image) are spam

And seeing as my stance ends up boiling down to "I want to do things my way and not have all these pesky regulations blocking me" - not sure how defensible it is

Note how much time I have spent arguing against this meta post in my head

Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to talk about this on meta, but I think what I have is bit thin here. I don't know much about your contributions outside ELL

So you've been anonymously editing posts on how many sites?

RPG is my main other

nearly all the first four pages of edits are mine

After that I edit on meta-meta sometimes, and then I edit a lot of HNQs for spelling, grammar, putting the question in the question and not just the title, and accessibility (image descriptions, removing unnecessary code formatting, table-fying)

Of the sites I have accounts on, Literature and Puzzling, I am top editor by far.

And... that's a wrap. Every so often when I get myself spam-banned I take a forced break, but other than that I edit nearly every day anonymously.

Want links to other site anon suggested edits, or the posts that I got banned on?

4:26 AM

@bobble Usually then you should narrow it down to what it is you do that can't be found in spam posts

(Or vandalism; that one is really hard though; because the edit removes all the post and adds some garbage instead)

You could also perhaps ask to make it laxer on sites with relatively less traffic than SO and other giants

For the ones that tend to get me banned (turning an image into a table) I remove no content; perhaps I will make the image into a link but I preserve the ability to look at it. What I do to trip the filter is add a large number of characters to the post - the fact that the characters were in the picture is invisible to the filter.

Spam suggested edits have been a problem in smaller sites as well - some cases documented on meta-meta and a few on per-site-metas

Hmm, if you don't add too many links, which I think is the case, you might still be able to argue it

@bobble Usually just a spasmodic spam wave

I mean technically I added a link, if you count changing an image into a link as adding a link

Yes that does count

Still, if you wanted to see if you could write a post on it, you could try the Tavern first to refine it a bit or see if it's a good idea. Not now though, it's pretty quiet there now

I've even gotten banned once for converting a MathJax table into a Markdown one - that was probably for removing characters that are required to format MathJax tables (\text{} etc.) but don't actually contribute content

The reason I was jokingly asking Eddie at all is I don't have a meta-meta account and don't plan to create one

For similar reasons as why I don't just sign up to get around the ban

4:35 AM

So anyway, why do you insist so much on editing anonymously, if you don't mind me asking?

On ELL, I mean

@bobble fair enough

Combination of two factors:
- I only want to make an account if I can be active in asking/answering, as I would inevitably get sucked into doing that
- I see stuff that needs to get fixed and want to fix it

Some discussion starting here:

Mar 29 at 16:42, by Eddie Kal

There have been some interesting suggested edits from an anonymous user

If I edit ~5 posts a day (reasonable assumption) I would actually hit the max suggested-edit rep of +1000 after only 100 days

5:00 AM

o\ zzz

7:02 AM

@bobble well ELL probably has a lot of mechanisms that prevent you from being sucked into anything, haha

I applaud the effort anyhoo

8:40 PM

I can edit anonymously on Money.SE and RPG.SE but not here... strange. Also, I've never gotten out of a ban in less than a day, that's also weird.

Though all my edits (even old ones, like the one Eddie linked in the discussion I linked above) have "Our system has identified this edit as possible spam; please review carefully" which is just hilarious

Yes, yes, see all this? Much spam, very much spam, yes yes.

woo, there I can edit here!

SE, you're weird an' you don't make sense, ya hear me?

This is deeply weird to me that I can already edit

9:30 PM

though looks like I'm pretty heavily rate-limited :/