Thread 5430

Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking to be able to ban people or anything drastic like that. But I think that giving janitors a couple more tools would make life much easier for both janitors and mods.

First off, I'd like to be able to issue warnings.

You can often see heated discussions that start to veer off topic and start shitting up a thread. In those situations, it would be helpful if I could issue warnings to people participating in it to try to calm them down and to get them to drop the issue. I know I can request warnings, but mods can't be expected to respond to those instantly, so the thread will keep getting shat up in the meantime. And I don't really feel like issues like these are worth bugging mods for their attention on the IRC.

It's possible to try to get people to drop the issue by deleting their conversation, but it's likely that they'll miss it and won't notice the mass deletion. Or they might notice it but keep arguing anyways. By giving them warnings you're sending them a direct message, so they're more likely to pay attention to it.

I know I can give them a time out by requesting a ban, but I often don't feel like those posts are worth banning people for, and it just wastes mods' time by sending them requests over trivial things. And by giving janitors the ability to issue warnings, it eases up the mod workload as they no longer need to process warning requests from janitors.

And while on the subject, I would like it if it was possible to issue a warning without deleting the post the warning was issued for. I'm not asking for the ability to give out public warnings or anything like that, but sometimes it feels like it would do more harm than good to delete a post, but the person making that post is still making a low quality contribution and should be warned about it.

>>5430 (OP)
As for the second issue, I would like to be able to move threads from one board to another.

I'm an /a/ janitor, so I deal with like a dozen request threads a day. It would be helpful if I could move those threads to /wsr/ instead of deleting them and requesting a warning for the people posting them. Mods don't have to deal with processing a warning request, and the newbie making that thread doesn't need to remake this thread, it would be automatically moved for him.

Also, sometimes you see some dumb funposting meme threads that are against the rules and should be deleted but it's a bit of a shame to do it because they're kinda funny. So instead of deleting them, I could just send them off to /trash/.

And finally, since /a/ really loves its meta thread, they pop up fairly regularly, so it would be nice to send them off to /qa/.

The only downsides that I see here is that people might at first be confused at the increased number of thread migrations, but eventually they'll get used to it. And it might cause some friction between janitors if a janitor from one board moves a "bad thread" from "his" board to another janitor's board, but that can always be solved by talking things through?

Wait, mods take into account previous bans and warnings when issuing bans, right? Then the warnings issued by janitors themselves should probably be (at least internally) differentiated from warnings issued by mods. Maybe give them an altogether different name?

>>5430 (OP)
>It's possible to try to get people to drop the issue by deleting their conversation, but it's likely that they'll miss it and won't notice the mass deletion. Or they might notice it but keep arguing anyways.
>I know I can give them a time out by requesting a ban, but I often don't feel like those posts are worth banning people for, and it just wastes mods' time by sending them requests over trivial things.

This is a problem I run into frequently, as checking the warning box doesn't give them that 15 minute time out.

Being able to sage threads without outright deleting them would be nice too.

>>5431
Moving threads is really disruptive, I don't think we'll ever get that feature as janitors.

I do however, think that giving janitors the ability to permasage threads makes a lot of sense, since permasaging would be a much less disruptive tool for curbing those gray area threads, rather than outright deleting them. Even if we had some kind of limit on how many we could do a day, it's a neat feature that could be more helpful if it was more accessible.

i know jannies don't/shouldn't try to steer policy, but talking about the short wishlist would still be nice, mod-kun

>>5435
(or at least, add it as a request option)

>>5435
This would be interesting

Kind of a dream scenario, but, howabout the ability to search through a combined index of all words in every thread currently active on the board.

You could instantly find people forcing/spamming spread in different threads, common shitpost phrases etc even if none of that stuff had been reported.

I just want to see all posts made by a particular poster in a thread. You can sorta tell through BRs filed currently, but it'd make it easier to tell if someone is evading or purposely trying to shit up a thread.

>>5442
This is not a feature janitors will ever have. Among several reasons, it runs completely contrary to what should be the default context in which we look at rule violations, which is within a single post. If it's not clearly rulebreaking, we don't need to do anything about it.

>>5442
if posts are shitting up a thread you should delete them anyway, doesn't matter if they were all by the same poster or not. If they're all on-topic they're not shitting up the thread.

>>5445
It's entirely possible to shit up a thread with on-topic posts. There's trolling, and there's flooding. If two people start flaming something over something petty that's 4chan. If one person starts arguing with himself about something petty in order to generate a huge shitstorm and generally degrade the quality of the threads, that's against the rules.

That said, I feel like it was obvious we were never going to have such a thing.

Simply being able to make things like move requests or sages more automatic would be nice.

Having it be a function like a BR that you submit to a queue for any mod casually looking at instead of a hunt in IRC could make it easier to deal with threads in ways other than simply deleting. It could increase the number of moves giving a real purpose to /trash/ rather than its 1-2 threads moved a day.

Also, a way to submit a Ban Evasion check request would be very helpful. Mods can see that the ip of post along with board and contents to judge whether one of the usual suspects or clear if unable to be sure. It saves constant pinging and cuts out the middleman. More mods would be able to help out all around instead of whichever poor mod talked last getting bombarded for hours.
Most if not all the shortcomings I have as a janitor come from not being able to find a mod, whether it be because of the time of day or there simply not being enough of them. Making the process more streamlined would help.

>>5455
As I see it, the difference between a ban/warn request and request for permasage/moving is that a ban does not have to be immediate. Unless the offender is spamming, a ban/warn will affect a poster in the same way whether it is immediate or several hours down the line. They will eventually know that a post they made had broken the rules.

However, permasage and thread moving are more urgent than that. A thread filled with offtopic discussion or irredeemable flaming may well be gone by the time a moderator sees it in the queue. Shuffling those requests in with BRs just means they're more likely to be irrelevant actions by the time they are executed.

For that reason, I think the IRC ping method is more appropriate, despite the limitation of not always being able to reach a mod.

>>5458
Slower boards do exist, takes nearly a week for a thread with no posts to die.

>>5459
There was a thread on /wsg/ that had been up for what a year or more about clowns?

/3/ has threads that last a month.

>>5460
I feel like most threads that need moving are often on fast boards, and even for their own board they're often exceptionally fast and shitty.

Currently, if you have the inline BR panel open for say post no. 1, you need to 'x' out of the BR panel to be able to select to BR post no. 2.

It would be pretty convenient if when you try to BR a new post, the BR panel would just go away/replace itself with a new one.

It's not really an additional tool, but it would be nice.

>>5458
depending on the time of day a br will be seen and dealt with quicker than it would take to find a mod looking at irc

I'd love it if the report page showed if which reports were made from the same thread.

It would be handy to be able to see the timestamps of the posts in the nested "view thread" window we can bring up in the que.

Even better would be an (optional?) indicator visible for every report showing how long ago the reported post in question was made. It wouldn't need to be exact, for example "3h" in italics somewhere on a report = that reported post was itself posted about ~3 hours ago.

Sometimes on /a/, I see a stream of fresh reports being submitted just now in response to posts that were themselves many hours old (upwards of half-day+ sometimes), posts which may no longer be strongly relevant to the current state of a thread. So, it would be nice to be able to at a glance cut through some noise to see which reports are tied to currently-relevant conversations, in order to have a better sense of what the priorities to deal with first might be.

>>5482
Something that I've wanted for a while now, which may help out when a mod is unavailable to run down which reports you send have or haven't been processed, or if they've been processed differently, is if each jani had access to a board specific and full version of this:
http://www.4chan.org/bans

I dunno how automated the page is, I know that bans are specifically selected to show, but having a list of everything the mods have processed would help greatly in determining who to BR again, when to escalate BR requests (off topic warn, to off topic, to garbage, to spam, etc.).

I know when in doubt to ask a mod (the problem I've had is I'm overly sure about what generally has or hasn't been processed) but this would cut down on ambiguous decision making schemes or if it's the asscrack of dawn and no mod is immediately available, or would be incredibly handy for boards with more than one jani but whose janitors are split wildly between timezones.

>>5484
Having a page where you can see processed bans for your board would be good for consistency for everyone on the board.

>>5484
I'm also interested in something like this. It'd be useful to see which requests are accepted/rejected/modified so that I don't waste people's time with ill-suited BRs/WRs.

I just want to be able to change the theme on /j/ to Tomorrow, browsing this board burns my eyes

>>5484
Oh yes, please. There are times when reports I was borderline on disappear and I really want to know how they were handled.

>>5484
This would be nice.

>>5492
If you get the addon stylish for your browser, you can set custom css for any website.
Just copy the tomorrow css to stylish and apply it to "sys.4chan.org"

>>5430 (OP)
It would be pretty cool if there was an option to warn the person that sent in the report for 'absusing reports' if its a blatantly unwarranted report.

>>5583
You mean like for a normal report, a warn telling them in essence "that wasn't an actionable post, stop that"? I've thought about this and, sometimes, very much want such a function if say some guy is reporting every single post in a valid thread, flooding the queue.

However, on the flip side it is too transparent a response to give unambiguous feedback on non-actionable posts. There are some things that are obvious to warn for as frivolous reporting, but some boards may have grey areas, and such a function could be instrumental in helping users map out the individual temperaments of various mods/jans at various points of the day, by spamming reports at those posts and using the presence/absence of a frivolous report warn as proof positive of differences aka inconsistencies aka exactly what they should not be aware of or trying to scope out.

Right now, if nothing happens to a post, people aren't sure whether it's because the jan/mods don't care or if no one's looked at the queue. I recall reading a study showing that when there are big pictures of eyes in a room, students are less likely to cheat. Meaning, even if in fact no jan/mod has checked out the queue lately, they still feel they're being watched. Giving a direct warn feedback about regular posts is a more direct "yes, someone's here" response than just leaving regular posts up because we cleared the reports.

>>5584
>>5583
How about letting us warn illegal reporters?

One thing I had been thinking about that could be nice is if the mods and janitors of a given board could set a few phrases as a sort of "alert" phrase.

This would function where if someone posts the alert phrase, it is automatically added to the bottom of the queue, maybe in a faded blue box, without needing to be reported. There are often specific ban evaders who like to spam the same shit over and over, day after day, and, especially if they post things you'd want gone very quickly, I could be helpful to be able to immediately see and take action against those posts without relying on someone to specifically report them.

Either way I agree with OP, that janitors being able to throw warnings for things would be a good addition. As it stands I feel warnings are sort of worthless because since there are so few palm tree men around to begin with, the warns will often never be filed in a timely manner.

We'd of course also make sure to not be full retard with the use of that power though. I doubt hiro would appreciate a flood of bitching on the feedback page about some guy getting 10,000 warnings because he has bad opinions or something.

>>5484
This is also a great idea. I often review my board's bans to see what is getting banned; a full overview would be extremely useful to see what is qualifying for banning and what isnt so I can correct what I BR or WR.

I do think Permsage requests (or just the ability to use them) and Thread Move Requests should be added to the BR interface at some point. Another thing that I on /vg/ would greatly appreciate (and I'm sure other boards would benefit from this) is the ability to BR and OP post without destroying the thread. Sometimes some dumbass puts borderline porn in the OP image, and as much as I'd like to BR him, if I catch it when the thread is 300 posts in, killing the whole thread just to BR that one person will cause more of a shitstorm than leaving it, and deleting the OP image alone isn't really a sufficient action.

>>5587
Oh, and being able to see in a thread itself when a post has been reported would also be extremely useful. I like at times just opening up a bread and skimming through it to see if I see anything wrong, and if I could see the posts reported in thread and clear/delete/BRWR as appropriate it'd probably make things run much smoother.

A couple of days ago, there was a post in a general thread on the board I janitor that had fourteen reports. The post itself seemed pretty innocuous to me, so I was going to ask a mod on IRC if that guy is a known ban evader or something. Before I got to ask the question, another janny asked it first. If I remember correctly, the mod didn't find anything wrong with the post in question, but he looked up the other posts the guy who made that post posted in the thread and a lot of them were shitposts so he deleted them all and banned the guy.

Many boards have a fair amount of generals and other sub-communities that have their own "culture" - memes, local celebrities, etc. So even if you regularly browse like 80% of the threads on the board you janitor, there's still going to be some you don't, so you won't really understand why people report some of the stuff they report, and obviously you can't post in the thread to ask people what's wrong with that post.

So I've been wondering, how about expanding the report function? When you (a regular user, not a janny) report a post, you also get an option to type up to a hundred letters/symbols (keep it short) explaining why you're reporting the post you're reporting. Obviously those explanations should be taken with a grain of salt, jannies shouldn't act out on them alone and e.g. BR someone for ban evading just because someone reported them for what they believe to be ban evading, etc. but it could be a bit helpful in providing some context behind some of the reports.

Has this subject been brought up before? It seems like an idea that would get brought up a lot. Is there some kind of technical limitation that prevents this from being implemented, or does it go against the site's moderation philosophy or something?

>>5593
Oh never mind, guess I'm an idiot and should have read >>5443 again.

This is mainly for globals or janitors who have several boards but it would be nice if there was an easier way to see how many reports are in the queue for each board. Sometimes the queue is huge but it's hard to pinpoint exactly which boards are the ones that need help.

As it is now you can either view all the reports for every board together you janitor or view the reports for each board individually, both of these are fine if you only have a few boards to janitor but if you janitor dozens of boards then it's easy for reports to accumulate somewhere without any indicator other than the report counter going up.

>>5628
Like pic related?

Messing around with the RQ extension, can I steal your idea?

>>5631
Yeah that can work.

>>5435
I too would like the ability to permasage. We could be required to select a reason for permasaging and they could be logged just as deletes and ban requests are to ensure the feature is not being abused.

Reasons I would permasage threads:
>Meta Thread
>Duplicate Thread
>Low-Quality/Off-Topic Thread
For the last two, threads could be deleted or OPs could be given bans/warning, but sometimes I find that can be too harsh or anti-fun. For example, when there is a new announcement or reveal in film or television is made, /tv/ can get filled with near identical threads. In the instance of low-quality/off-topic threads, there are often threads about celebrity news that don't exactly pertain to the actor/actresses career and roles, but are interesting nonetheless.

Janitor permasages could even be less stealthy than the ones Mods can apply. "Permasaged: [Reason]" could be displayed next to the thread stats.

>>6229
God yes please that would help even if it's just part of the ban request box as a checkmark, like next to "Warn?"

Its a much less destructive feature than outright deleting but if everyone is permasaging threads everywhere and a whole board is slidin twoards page 10, anon's gonna freak. i dont think we'll ever have this power, it changes the workflow too much

>>6229
I also like this idea

>>6233
In our heads, we'd like to think that 4chan is a place for "high quality" posting and discussion, but we simultaneously will not nuke outright shitposts for the (very valid) reason of giving people freedom to talk about what they like, as long as that shitpost is tangentially on-topic and not breaking any global rules.

/g/ is a board that would benefit hugely from janitors being able to permasage what would generally be considered shit threads. Plenty of threads add absolutely zero value to the board but will ultimately attract a lot of responses (pic related), mostly because it's easy for posters to add their equally neutral, non-constructive posts and constantly bump a tangentially on-topic thread to the first page.

Permasage would be a good solution to what can be a huge issue for some boards.

This would be nice

>>6242
Permasage feature would be a godsend

It would be really helpful if Janitors had access to an ID system, so we can tell if someone is avatar-posting easily.

What do you guys think?

>>6244
Wont happen, we're not supposed to be able to identify posters or something.
It's a bit of a nuance, but if you see a lot of the same character being posted for no particular reason other than to hold a conversation (and if it's not just a character theme thread like you see on /a/c/e/h/v/jp/whatever/) you can stick it with an avatarfag ban request if you're confident or attempt the whole pinging a mod thing.
Can then go back and check the other similar images and see if they have a pending avatar ban request on them.

In my book most of these requests would be godsends (modsends?), especially anything that would help us figure identify individually disruptive posters, but I think that 4chan doesn't plan to roll out anything of the sort to janitors.

a lot of these seem like they'd be a bit much, but being able to warn posters owuld be nice.