Partially decentralised moderating

[DooMAD]

People generally agree we need more moderation to combat low quality spam posts, but many people wouldn't volunteer to do it as a full-time job.  Would there be an easy way to implement a system where those with good reporting history could earn "Mod Points"?  

We could start small to test the concept and make sure there's no abuse.  So, as an example, for every 200 accurate reports you make, you would earn a single "Mod Point", which you could expend to delete one spam post.  Then, if people aren't abusing it and the idea proves successful, we could lower the threshold to 100, then later maybe even 50 or fewer accurate reports.  You could also use any combination of rank/trust/merit as a prerequisite too if potential abuse is a concern.  Maybe it might be decided that you have to be Sr Member or above with no negative trust to be eligible to earn mod points.  But since anyone found to be abusing it would obviously risk losing their account permanently, I don't think abuse would be a big issue.  If you've taken the time and effort to make lots of accurate reports, it's fair to assume you care enough about the forum not to act maliciously.

[//EDIT1:  And forum staff would need to get a report so they can monitor that it's being used correctly]
[//EDIT2:  It's something that could work in conjunction with the proposed reporter badges with some refinement]

Eventually, this could ease the burden on the existing mods and encourage higher posting standards in the community.

Thoughts?

[LoyceMobile]

This will at best create a few percent less reports. That won't take a significant load off the Mods, while it's more work to implement than just adding new Mods.

[Welsh]

This could be abused though. A lot of people would then just report the obvious spam, and then use their "mod point" for malicious purposes. Remember, not all staff members even have the permissions to delete site wide, but only in their sections that they are assigned. Patrollers can delete newbie posts site wide.

Although, it would be nice to promote more reporting, and more users deleting spam. It would likely be abused, and wouldn't work in reality.

[markiz73]

In our forum, spam is not in all boards. Ideal forum is very difficult. The main spam goes in the boards related to the ICO and altcoins.
Entire teams are working on creating fake activity. You just need to restore order in these boards. If the moderators do not cope, you need to find more helpers.

[DooMAD]

This could be abused though. A lot of people would then just report the obvious spam, and then use their "mod point" for malicious purposes. Remember, not all staff members even have the permissions to delete site wide, but only in their sections that they are assigned. Patrollers can delete newbie posts site wide.

Although, it would be nice to promote more reporting, and more users deleting spam. It would likely be abused, and wouldn't work in reality.

Perhaps I am too trusting.  Would a bolded red message stating "Abuse of this feature will lead to the permanent ban of your account" not incentivise good behaviour?  It stands to reason that because it's very difficult to attain a high rank now, if you restricted its usage to members with high ranks, Senior Members or above, they won't want to risk losing their accounts.  It would be a given that forum staff would have to receive some sort of report to verify it's being used correctly.  I should probably add that to the OP, actually.

[Welsh]

You would be surprised the lengths that people will go to get their own way or a bad comment off of their thread. Anyway, if they really want to get rid of one or two comments they could report with a newbie/jr member, and they probably wouldn't care if they get banned. Reporting as a newbie is painful because of the time restrictions, but some people would probably do it. I have no doubt that they would at least abuse it with the hundreds of Jr member accounts they already have.

In our forum, spam is not in all boards. Ideal forum is very difficult. The main spam goes in the boards related to the ICO and altcoins.
Entire teams are working on creating fake activity. You just need to restore order in these boards. If the moderators do not cope, you need to find more helpers.

Considering the amount of activity that goes on in these sections that you mention. There aren't a lot of reporters. There's a few users that report a lot of posts there,  but not a lot of unique users that do.

[pugman]

Not the best idea, tbh. People would just report 200 posts, legitimate or not, and delete something that's very crucial, abuse their powers, and add more work to admins, for restoring purposes.

Centralized moderation is better, for this forum especially. We only have a few mods, which isn't great, but its not bad either. We could have mods assigned to each and every board,and have patrollers and global mods to help the other mods. We Admins, could even have a new mod type, given higher power than the normal mods, and lower power than global mods,for managing an entire board(like board number 1). The forum's way of moderation is bad. Things need to change, but I doubt if it ever will.

[DooMAD]

Not the best idea, tbh. People would just report 200 posts, legitimate or not, and delete something that's very crucial,

No, you don't earn the points for all reports, just the ones the moderators have marked "good".  If there are still concerns, it could be further restricted so that only newbie posts could be deleted.

It could be a tiered system based on when you unlock the badges:

300+ good reports, you can only remove "Brand new" ranked posts
1000+ good reports, you can remove "Newbie" and lower ranked posts
5000+ good reports, you can remove "Jr Member" and lower ranked posts

Maybe the higher reporting badges could earn mod points a bit faster as well.  But there are definitely ways and means to curb the potential for abuse.

[lord munchkin]

In order for this system to work, moderators would have to be the only people with the power to decide whether a post was spam or not, and award the accurate report. Otherwise, people would just create mass accounts and vote their own posts. This would put an even larger strain on the current mods and I assume it would take about 6 months before we saw people with even a single mod point.

This system would increase the workload of moderators and staff who are already under pressure. I think the best way to combat spam would be to hire a few more moderators.

[darklus123]

This could be abused though. A lot of people would then just report the obvious spam, and then use their "mod point" for malicious purposes. Remember, not all staff members even have the permissions to delete site wide, but only in their sections that they are assigned. Patrollers can delete newbie posts site wide.

Although, it would be nice to promote more reporting, and more users deleting spam. It would likely be abused, and wouldn't work in reality.

Agree, Everytime we can make suggestions we will also try consider first its negative effect. I guess that is still the main concern to why theymos rarely approves user requests. The fact that even mods have restrictions in deleting post only on their section therefore theymos is really keeping that function not to be abused.

[vit05]

I did not like that idea. I believe that all point systems like this, users can gamify. That is, they would try their best to defraud the system for its own benefit. They could create thousands of bad topics, out of rule, for a single user to earn thousands of points.

So he would use the profile to exclude topics he did not like, service topics competing with his services, or topics from people he does not like.

[hugeblack]

A good idea worth experimenting, but I think the solution to this problem is to eliminate the roots of this problem and not its branches.
Commitment to merit to be rank-up "to Jrmember," removing signatures from newbies, and restrictions on the posts of newbies in specific boards and then the appointment of a large number of mods to that boards, all these solutions may solve this problem.
The same idea was put forward to get merits and was rejected by theymos.

Exactly. There is no good way to detect that; it'd only become possible to see patterns over a long period of time, and only if you really look closely.

[markiz73]

You would be surprised the lengths that people will go to get their own way or a bad comment off of their thread. Anyway, if they really want to get rid of one or two comments they could report with a newbie/jr member, and they probably wouldn't care if they get banned. Reporting as a newbie is painful because of the time restrictions, but some people would probably do it. I have no doubt that they would at least abuse it with the hundreds of Jr member accounts they already have.

In our forum, spam is not in all boards. Ideal forum is very difficult. The main spam goes in the boards related to the ICO and altcoins.
Entire teams are working on creating fake activity. You just need to restore order in these boards. If the moderators do not cope, you need to find more helpers.

Considering the amount of activity that goes on in these sections that you mention. There aren't a lot of reporters. There's a few users that report a lot of posts there,  but not a lot of unique users that do.

So maybe everything is okay and there is no problem.
Does anyone have a statistics of complaints about spam on the forum?
People are constantly trying to complicate the system, but this does not give results.
Any system can be deceived, even very complex.

[hilariousetc]

I think this system would open us up to huge potential for abuse, but if people are trusted to be able to do this and they would obviously be beneficial to the community/staff due to their volume of accurate reports then they should probably just be made a mod. We obviously are in need of some more mods here and this will only become more apparent as the community grows and the abuses that come along with it so theymos should just assign some more mods from the top reporters. I don't think we should be creating a system that allows non-staff to remove posts because there will obviously be some people who just acquire enough mod points to remove some post they want to get rid of for whatever reason.

[DooMAD]

Fair enough, I'll lock this one down, then.