UPDATED: Comment Abuse
I’ve been advised that my previous post on Comment Abuse was alarming, so I wanted to post something more detailed and lay out the situation.
EQ2Wire is starting to develop a community of loyal readers, some of whom post comments under our articles. We appreciate these comments, as it helps give us direct feedback on how we are doing at communicating ideas, summarizing information, etc. as well as give us ideas for coverage.
We currently moderate or approve the first few posts of each new user here to make sure that comments are not offensive, abusive towards other players, or containing content likely to get EQ2Wire filtered out by workplace filters and firewalls. Once a user has had a few posts approved, they are then able to post freely without waiting for their message to appear. Quite a few people read EQ2Wire because it’s the only EQ2 website that is not yet blocked at their office.
With this in mind, over the last few days, we have seen a growing number of comments which are offensive or attacking other members. Most of these have not been visible to the public, or if they were, they were deleted quickly by our crack team (oh wait, that’s just me and Dethdlr) of comment approver monkeys. We have no problem with constructive criticism, but some folks have been crossing the line, trying to turn this site into EQ2Flames.
It’s just a few people, less than a dozen, and so we are able to deal with the issue relatively quickly, but if it does become a growing problem in the future, then we may have to take some actions. These actions may include approving more posts before a user is ‘free and clear’ to post. Another possibility is to start using user registration for expedited commenting and all other posts would be moderated.
We also are retaining the right, in extreme cases of abusive posts directed towards EQ2Wire, SOE, EQ2, or other players, to gather information and report it to ISPs. This, of course, would be extremely rare, but in the interest of full disclosure, I wanted to make this information available up front.
So far we have been very lucky to have a growing community of people who are genuinely interested in posting constructive comments. We’d like to keep it that way!
Morgan
Trackback from your site.
Comments (9)
zianlo
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I havent posted a comment in like 3 months! =P
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Anon
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Out of curiosity, what “action” are you going to take?
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Feldon
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Well the first step for folks who keep posting after they have been asked to stop, is to make a list of IP addresses and times of posting and contact the associated ISP.
If that doesn’t work then I would have to come up with a priority commenters account where you login to eq2wire to post unrestricted.
This obviously makes more work for me and is only for folks posting over and over under random email addresses and IPs and evading my efforts to keep the comments readable at the office without getting the site flagged. Some people read eq2wire because it’s not filtered at work.
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Blockhead
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Things should calm down now that fanfair is over and the F2P news is a couple weeks old.
Overall, you must be doing a good job as i haven’t seen anything that would prompt this post or i am getting better at ignoring it. And that is key, ignore the trolls, i know i can be accused of feeding them here and there.
A friend told me this. “Post what you have to say, then move on.” He knows who i am on EQ forums and laughs at me, you get sucked in way too easy bro.
He emails me this one day:
http://kotaku.com/358523/someone-is-wrong-on-the-internet
Hey, I’m working on it, i’m improving, there are just so many people out there that are wrong and once i get them all set right, i’ll rest. /jk
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ninmah
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Thanks Feldon for not making this another bbq for the regular flamers! 🙂
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Phujiak
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Yeah…Air Force started blocking your site last week…/fail.
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Feldon
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Thanks all. I rewrote my comments. I like the comments and want to keep this part of the site usable.
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Feldon
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Phujiak,
Ouch, sorry to hear that. Thank you for your service.
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Feldon
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The following poster has been banned on three separate occasions from posting comments on EQ2Wire that were insulting or flaming other members, or trolling. After 5 separate e-mail exchanges, I warned this user to stop commenting here and that their next comment would result in their e-mail address being posted publicly. That warning was not heeded, so…
Keene
keene@gmail.com
135.214.150.100
Brian
axtell2k3@yahoo.com
135.214.150.104
Brian
brian.shearon@gmail.com
135.214.42.30
Chris
axtell2k3@yahoo.com
99.49.197.77
In case you think I am being unfair, I want to point out that in one post, Brian/Chris Shearon/Keene mocked players who predicted that Free-to-Play with a more powerful StationCash store was coming. In today’s post, he lambastes players who complain about powerful StationCash items, stating “Why do you care what another player has?” Switching sides of an argument to generate maximum controversy and negative attention is the modus operandi of a troll.
Reply