Hidden posts, Corners, Reported Content

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Hidden posts, Corners, Reported Content

Here are few announcements to let you know about some back end things.

 

Hidden Posts

During the dust up with Jon, I don't know how in hell it happened, but ALL of his content got set to "hidden." He kept finding nooks and crannies to alter the forum with whatever he could put to show me he could not be moderated (reactions, reported content, changing whatever he could, etc.). His attempts was so pervasive and he was so creative at finding ways I had to keep looking anew to find a way to stop each one. Even just now, finishing up some back office stuff, I found a "signature file" for some kind of function that doesn't appear anywhere, but for reason he still had access to it.

There I found this gem: 

Quote

--> MSK bites donkey dicks.

 

Say what you will, Jon was not boring.  

So I might have done something to cause his content to be hidden, but I can't find where if I did. Or, he used to work in computing, so maybe he managed to do it in some manner or other.

Regardless, I looked at all the global controls I could find in several places in the back office, but I couldn't find a way to set all of his content to "not hidden" in one whack. But I did find a way to do it in blocks of 25 posts in a thread. So I dug in.

(This paragraph and the next are boring, so you can skip them if you like.  ) There were 149 Hidden Content pages of 25 posts each when I started. But I could not unhide those posts from the Hidden Content page. This meant I had to open the first post on one of those Hidden Content pages, which would open in a Forum thread on a page of 25 posts. On that page, I had to select all posts that were hidden, then unhide them. Sometimes I got lucky and there were several hidden posts on a page. Many times there was only one hidden post.

Then I had to go back to the Hidden Content page, refresh the page to remove the post or posts that had been unhidden, then open the next post and do it all over. Over and over and over and over and over. 

In short, it was a massive pain in the ass. But I did it and today I finished the last one. All of Jon's content, to my knowledge, is no longer hidden.

But I also discovered something interesting doing this. See next.

 

Corners of Insight

I found one poster in particular who has a Corner of Insight in his name who hid whole threads in his corner and several different posts all over the place. He only had a small fraction of posts as Jon did, but there were enough to be fishy. I believe this was due to bickering with someone on OL, or more likely, being pissed that I supported President Trump. We lost several people back during the primaries of the 2016 election and the general election. 

A person who has a Corner of Insight named after him (and her, since there was Barbara Branden), had awesome super-powers in their Corner and sometimes on OL itself. 

Then I discovered another person who had a Corner of Insight who deleted all his content except one thread. Then some others deleted rather well-known threads in their Corners. What these people didn't take into account was the contributions to their material by other OL members. They simply deleted it all and bulldozed over the other OL members.

None of these people let me know what they were doing. They simply did it because they could. They must have known I would eventually discover it. So why not let me know what they did even after they did it?

Good character? Heh...

These are some of the same people who have bitched long and hard about ARI rewriting history and writing facts ARI finds inconvenient out of history.

One of the functions of OL, from the beginning, has been to preserve an historical record of what went on in our subcommunity, at least among the luminaries and other people who came to OL. Some of this material has now been rewritten out of history by these people, including material by other OL members who had no say in the matter.

How's that for integrity the Objectivism way?

I, myself, who hold the keys to the kingdom would never do that. The only times I have were about spam and flame wars that were getting out of hand. And even then, I set up a "Garbage Pile" so I would not have to delete anything when there was something of substance in the middle of a flame war or a lot of trolling.

There were the few times I have had to moderate someone, but as regulars here know, I almost always let the content through (unless it was just trolling--which I often posted about), then end up un-moderating the person after he or she cooled off. There are a few (very few) banned people, and hell, even their content has stayed up as an historical record. Even the stuff from the crazy lady.  

At any rate, this made me rethink my policy of granting the power to delete or hide the content of others on OL to people I set up corners for.

Now nobody can do that except me (and Kat since she is co-owner, and she never does).

 

Reported Content

I also discovered a section called Reported Content in the back end. Way back a long time ago, the forum used to advise me when someone reported content and I would deal with it.

Then someone at IPB got the idea that it would be a good thing to trick people into signing up to IPB forums by allowing guests to post, but not allowing their content to show until they signed up to the forum. (Also, this increased bandwidth use IPB could charge for.) On arriving at OL, a guest would be invited to post on OL, but had to give his email to do it. After "posting," the guest would receive an email saying they had to sign up as an OL member in order for his content to show. 

I discovered this by accident a couple of months ago and disabled it. Getting new members that way has nothing to do with a philosophy forum. I only want people to become a member because they want to, not because they are tricked into it.

But all of those posts made by guests on OL for several years (most of them were pure spam put there by bots) were sent to the Reported Content section in the back end. So I had a massive amount of that crap to delete (of course, only 25 at a time). I think IPB turned off notification of Reported Content to administrators and moderators because of complaints from many IPB forums about all those spam posts being reported.

I discovered there were normal OL members who have reported content for some time and this was in the middle of all the crap. Some of those complaints go back several years. In other words, they reported content, but I did not receive a notice. I finally finished deleting the crap, so now I will deal with the Reported Content complaints that are legit, maybe a few each day, with all due apologies. I did not ignore these complaints. I didn't know they existed.

Part of my routine from now on will be to look at the Reported Content section at least a couple of times a week.

 

That's all for now.

Onward and upward.

And thank you to OL members and lurkers for being here all this time. I love you all.

OL rocks despite anything they throw at us.

And it will rock even more when it improves as planned in the not too distant future.

 

Michael