I don’t think so. I think every new user would get frustrated, and many would start opening and scrolling through threads without reading just to get the TL up. Usually, when someone is a new user, they’ve already lurked enough to read a few threads.
Lemme just see, we started with users posting too much in the correct place, and now we have shifted from users posting in the wrong place.
I keep thinking how to best deal with it using the existing framework instead of changing it. All I keep going back to is, “users posting deluges of project announcements in project announcements is a valid use of the board”. I keep going back to, “what are we trying to fix”. I keep going back to, "the specific problem appears to exist with the AI users, so things are getting muddled, and we are saying of course we don’t mean AI itself but we are saying this problem exists within AI users so we’re still targeting the same group of people.
My position on this has probably changed a few times over the course of this thread, shattering my credibility. Still, I still think the honeypot is a good idea. People want to come and post their AI thing? Is a sufficient number of people doing it that warrants action? (if the answer to these were no, this thread would not exist) Then I still say, let them. Give them a place for it. Barring them is now causing other trouble, and the original problem is still there.
Yeah, creating a forum account to ask here is probably already a much bigger barrier than just asking an LLM; I don’t think we should add any more friction than we can help…
I’m never going to agree with this. Although maybe I’m disagreeing with a different statement: outsiders advertising their projects while otherwise being completely unwilling to be part of the community AT ALL is not a valid use of the forum.
But if the moderation burden is more of a problem than the actual problem… then eh. But I’m not sure anyone other than the mods has the insight to make that call…
I agree with you, but the “nots” and “otherwises” are doing my head in, so lemme be more clear in my position and include yours:
I think users posting deluges of project announcements in project announcements is a valid use of the board. I also think users who do drive-by announcements without any interest in being part of the community is not.
This seems about right, and thank you, it redirects my attention to the real problem which I’d lost track of.
But still. How do you know someone is not going to interact with the community at all? Sure we can say “this is clearly a post about someone who registered to dump this and then left”. But that’s a bit of a crystal ball argument. Anyone can fudge any system just enough to comply with its requirements, dump a thing, and leave. Judging intent is going to be tricky. And probably not something that you can do with a restriction or two. We’re entering an ideological thing, which is good and all, it’s good to ideologically want this place to be for those who want to interact and provide value. It makes sense to try and get people to understand “this isn’t a dump for your projects”.
Where I think this may be going in the sligthly-less-right direction is that we’re now hiding the right door for those people, so they’re dumping elsewhere. So… that didn’t work. We’re now talking about putting a bouncer on the door to screen people until they’re “legit”. The actual effort involved in becoming legit, TL1, is minimal, and I agree with that. Thinking aloud, if I think that we should trust the framework, then that’s what the framework does: TL0 means people who are not considered a trusted member of the community. It makes sense they can’t post links. So… what failed here? I’m struggling to identify things at the very basic level. Because I still think that the answer would preferably be within using the framework rather than creating new restrictions
At first I misread and thought you said “I can agree with”, interestingly. But your response makes it hard for me to understand your meaning. Still, I hope that the post above clarifies my position.
Stepping back to “what problem are we solving?”, since I think the thread has drifted from it. As far as I can tell, the problem is: people arrive, announce their project, and engage with nothing else. But announcing is a form of engagement. What we’re really objecting to is that it’s one-way. The norm we care about is reciprocity.
If that’s right, I would suggest that no category or trust-level setting can enforce it. TL1 measures reading, not reciprocity, and as Zarf noted, a new poster only ever meets the restriction once, so it can’t teach anything.
HanonO mentioned that staff already review new topics from TL0 users. That seems like the whole solution: state the norm plainly up front, and when a first post is an announcement, decline it with a friendly boilerplate note explaining why and inviting them back. No category juggling, and no judging what counts as an “announcement” after the fact. Anyone who clears that bar and still doesn’t engage can simply be ignored.
The question would then be if that’s workable from a moderator perspective.
This is the adjustment we made for moderation - originally if the announcement was legit IF (and not AI slop) we would move it to Playing > Project Announcements even if the user was new, but we’re now rejecting project announcements from any TL_0. Going forward, if announcements are posted in the wrong category and flagged, they get rejected instead of moved no matter how legit they are. Basically “Join the club before you promote your thing.” The trust level 1 requirements are ridiculously easy and require members to read some threads and spend 10 minutes on the Forum. Project Announcements are the only type of slightly restricted activity for new users.
If a user registers a new account and announces a project as TL_0, it gets removed. We don’t know if they will participate, but it’s easy enough for them to read the forum a bit and repost their announcement once they attain TL_1. Just because someone has a post rejected once doesn’t mean they get deleted or banned. They can repost an announcement again once they meet the requirements via legit forum participation.
Basically we’re requiring an easy buy-in to promote a project on the Forum to weed-out drive-by spam.
TL_1 Requires 5 unique topics entered, 30 read posts (scrolled past), 10 minutes of time spent on forum ↩︎
TL_2 Requires 20 unique topics entered, 100 read posts, 60 minutes spent on forum, 15 visits on separate calendar dates, 1 like given, 1 like received, 3 posted topic replies ↩︎
TL_3 Requires account be at least 80 days old and 40 dates visited in previous 80 days, 25% of topics and posts created in the last 80 days must be read/viewed (topics viewed cap 250, posts viewed cap 2000), 100 total topics viewed all time, fewer than 5 flagged posts in last 80 days, 15 likes given, 10 likes received. TL_3 can be lost automatically if requirements are not maintained and can be earned again. There is a 30-day grace period before TL_2 demotion - so there is time to re-quality as TL_3 if a member dips below requirements temporarily.) TL_3 gets access to Lounge and can edit topic titles, tags, and change category of any accessible post. ↩︎
Having followed this topic (and no doubt having lost track of its repetitions) over time, I thought about what @Rui was saying about thinking back to first principles kind-of-thing. So I’ve done that for myself.
At the moment, people announce a project in the topic for project announcements. The AI ones are flagged AI before I see them, and they constitute 90% of the ones which annoy me. (Are they flagged by mods when they arrive? I read or skim-read all the announcements, because to me it just helps with general awareness of what’s going on.)
Anyway, in the end, the increased visibility of people producing systems or games using AI, with a degree of obliviousness, then announcing them here apropos of nothing, is annoying to me. But I’m the one choosing to at least glance at them all anyway. And the ones which have tended to be most annoying to me already have an AI tag on them.
I don’t block the AI tag, but it seems an easy dodge for me to either decide not to read them (which is currently easy - they’re in one subforum, labelled, obvious, and they’re not so numerous as to cause traffic problems) or do better cognitive work in myself to either accept my annoyance or not even be annoyed in the first place. I’m the one reading them.
So I am fine with changing nothing, at least as long as it’s not such a major logistical traffic problem – i.e. keeping people from finding or reading things they’d find more useful. If it got more like that, then I’d probably change my mind.
Actually, I’ve been thinking about the honeypot and there’s a huge problem that I don’t know how noone’s called me out on it.
If we do that, we are essentially creating and acknowledging a trash heap, a landfilll, a place to avoid for many people. As well as legitimising drive-by announcements, by providing them a place to exist. I’m not sure either of those are actually a good idea.
Sorry, Candy64, it’s not very nice of me to say this after you just supported the idea. It’s just that I’d been thinking about it, and I thought I should verbalise the problems I perceieve with it as well.
Here’s something that I’m surprised hasn’t been discussed yet (as far as I know): where are the offending users coming from? How are they finding this forum and clocking it as relevant to their projects?
I’m just wondering, strictly as a thought experiment of course, whether creating a category called something like “garbage that no one wants to see” and moving offending posts into it would eventually lead to word getting around and stymying the flow.
Honeypots are for bots, and are basically an admission that moderating isn’t otherwise working. We’re not at that point yet.
Everyone should definitely feel free to mute the ai tag. That won’t eliminate all drive by announcements, but it will take it back to how it was a few years back, which no one really seemed to mind.
This forum is one of the top Google results for “interactive fiction”, and some of the threads here show up highly in the results for “text games”. I assume that’s where people are coming from?
I’d be curious to know if r/interactivefiction and r/textgames have the same problem given that they’re also top Google results for the same terms. If they’re not also suffering under the same deluge then maybe it’s worth investigating where our traffic is coming from, and if they are then maybe there’s something to learn from how they are (or aren’t) dealing with it.
I believe the former is moderated by @mathbrush - hopefully the tag is ok, since this is a long thread and not sure he’s tracking it any more (I know I’ve drifted in and out of reading it).
I was moderator for two years, but I dropped out specifically because it was flooded with Ai project announcements and I was annoyed and bored with blocking them all of the time.
I think maybe a better analogy is that we are creating a smoking section outside of our bar. People who want to smoke cigarettes have a place where they can do so. The non-smokers don’t have to be around their cigarette smoke when they go outside. Those smokers who are good members of the bar’s social circle don’t feel that they can’t participate in the non-smoking parts of the community; they just take a break every few hours where they withdraw briefly and then return. Those people who only hang out in the smoking section don’t get much overlap with the rest of us inside the bar, but that’s the choice they’ve made.
If you handle the smoking section well (don’t put it by the front door; don’t put it in a place where the loss of that place fells like a genuine loss to everyone else, like the only outdoor deck with a good view), it doesn’t have much impact on the rest of the people in the bar who don’t smoke. What small amount of negative impact it does have is more than made up for by the fact that most of the people who use the smoking section make social contributions of greater value than that small amount of negative impact.
Some people are still going to stay away from any bar with a smoking section, just as some people are always going to respond negatively to almost any characteristic, and some of those people are never going to see any compromise as acceptable; what the bar needs to decide is whether on balance they want to lose those people or the smokers, and whether the bartenders are on balance still happy with their jobs even if they have to clean out the ashtrays once in a while.
I’ve always thought if you are going to have smoking areas, they should be hermetically sealed bubbles with negative ventilation pressure and a mandatory decon shower at the exit.
Forbidding drive-by posting seems reasonable. For untrusted users, what about whitelisting dedicated help sections for honest questions and blocking everything else?
About the “smoking section” analogy, I wonder whether maybe we already have that. It’s the AI tag itself.
EDIT - Which, again, brings the “honeypot” idea closer to the problem of “lots of people making AI project announcements”, which I think turned out not to be the core problem; but rather, a symptom of “lots of people making drive-by announcements without wanting to engage with the community”.
BTW, I’m not sure how visible this is, but Hanon has created a thread proposing another solution. Since we’re still asking “what if we…?” questions, it may be relevant to take a gander at:
For the moment, Hanon’s got it rigged up so that all TL0 posts need explicit moderator approval, which I think should handle this part—if someone posts a project announcement, regardless of category, we’ll deny it, and if someone posts a help request, regardless of category, we’ll approve it.
Still, I still think the honeypot is a good idea. People want to come and post their AI thing? Is a sufficient number of people doing it that warrants action? (if the answer to these were no, this thread would not exist) Then I still say, let them. Give them a place for it. Barring them is now causing other trouble, and the original problem is still there.
But your response makes it hard for me to understand your meaning. Still, I hope that the post above clarifies my position.