Dictionary Bot is an advanced AI learning bot that tries to learn what words mean by how people use them. It once saw a guy responding to a twitter post about kids being allowed to wear PE kits to stave off extreme heat and called it woke.
You realize, of course, that one person can like/dislike a post 50+ times, without breaking any rules because that’s just how this forum is designed, and so that system was never at all useful, right?
There isn’t even a part of the CoC forbidding it.
you can’t - you do that enough you get a forum vacation. That is called abusing the report function. Pretty odd thing to admit to doing given your thread.
yeah you can’t know this.
Where in the TOS do you see anything telling you you can’t switch characters once one character is out of likes/flags?
Like I get it, that would make sense, but I’m pretty sure there’s in fact no such rule.
We could be just like the other Blizzard forums and have battletags where people can’t abuse alts.
Have us select character avatar than battletag name…
I’d also bet that mods don’t even look for that kind of thing anyways. Not unless someone with “pull” (e.g. green/orange) somehow brings something like that to their attention, but then how would they know?
I would just be fairly hesitant to assume that something the forums are deliberately designed to allow you to do is against the rules, despite it never being stated anywhere in the rules. And getting punished for something that isn’t against the rules and is expressly allowed via normal use of the forums seems pretty unfair to me.
I mean unless you’re multi-flagging the same post. I could see that particular use-case being treated as malicious/disruptive behavior. (Seriously, they should fix these forums so that isn’t even possible.)
Yeah that’s the issue. People can flag the same posts with multiple toons.
Spamming or Trolling
This category includes:
- Excessively communicating the same phrase, similar phrases, or pure gibberish
- Creating threads for the sole purpose of causing unrest on the forums
- Causing disturbances in forum threads, such as picking fights, making off topic posts that ruin the thread, insulting other posters
- Making non-constructive posts
Abusing the Reported Post feature by sending false alarms or nonsensical messages
- Numbering a thread, IBTL, TLDR, or any other fad statements
If a player is found to have participated in such actions, they will:
- Be given a temporary or permanent ban from the forums, depending upon severity
Glaxigrav explains it here.
When a single post or individual receives a lot of reports, it goes to our Moderation team for review while hiding the post once a certain threshold is reached. While the intent here is to hide stuff that the community feels is against the Code of Conduct, you are correct in that some individuals try to weaponize the reporting system. We can and do take action against people who abuse our reporting systems, but I wanted to go into a bit more depth on how we do it and how we hope to improve.
Currently, we review the flags in a Review queue. Here we can see all of the individuals who reported a post and what their flag reasons are, as well as their flag history. As you know individual characters are treated as singular accounts, so some will try to use multiple alts to flag a post. We can see this, and will suspend a user for systems abuse (which scales duration based on previous penalties, culminating in permanent loss of forum permissions). There are some ambitious plans to group character/account on the moderation side more clearly in the future (for example, we want things like Trust Level to share across characters. Account actions already work across characters).
One of the requests we have in to further improve how we monitor and support community health is to more easily surface these bad actors through reporting*. These data points and dashboards take time to get developed and updated, but it’s something we do take seriously and are working with partners on how to handle these types of infractions more intelligently with data rather than looking at reactionary reporting.
Something that you can do to help us: If you are confident that you are being harassed by someone exploiting the reporting system, contact our Moderation team . A link to the reported post is extremely helpful, as is any links to previous or similar behavior. From there our Moderation team can review that person’s flag history and determine if further action needs to be taken.
*Edit: For clarification, the use of “reporting” here is more of the analytical kind of report, where we can pull data on potential malicious use of the flag system.
I don’t think switching to report new things is going to get you in trouble, but if someone switches alts to report the same posts in malicious ways or as harassment, it will get them a forum vacation.
Thanks Mirasol for finding that
Yeah this is especially irksome. At least make it unlimited for high trust levels. If I’m trusted enough to make a big old blog post I’d hope I’m also trusted enough to not abuse the reporting system. I actually do care about this odd little forum community.
Careful what you wish for, it might come true.
Aaah, I see. I think you’re right. The wording of this suggests that it is only reporting the same post multiple times on alts that’ll get you in trouble. Which makes sense, since even if that weren’t stated anywhere it could fall under the disruptive behavior umbrella. Thank you for clarifying this.
So it sounds like they can see things. The question is whether they actually care to do anything. My best guess is that they won’t do anything if it’s a one-off or at least infrequent. Last thing you’d want to do is nuke someone because they accidentally reflagged a post after switching to an alt, thinking their flag never went through.
As for whether the post will get hidden with multiple same-person flags - yes, yes it will.
Yeah forum moderation is a joke.
Pretty true actually.
It is interesting that the contact the mod team link no longer seems to work.
It’s also a two and a half year old post that may not even be indicative of current state.
The support ticket system was revised since then and some of the support pages too. I should have thought of that and checked the link.
The content is correct though as far as forum functionality. Glaxigrav is actually one of the more senior persons and was involved in the acquisitions and set up of the forums for Blizzard. Worked, along with others, with Discourse on features, etc. He now works another level up in management.
There is no “Contact mods” exactly, but that link used to go to the ticket option for appeal where you can discuss forum issues.
Here is the current link for the Forum Appeal which someone could use to reach mods.
https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/product/services/316/1968/solution
that isn’t what they claimed they could do - you can’t flag a post on one character and then flag it again on another and then flag the same post again on another to get it buried.
Yes, you can, but I wouldn’t advise doing so.