Anonymous Posting + Region Filters + WSO Announcements
ANNOUNCEMENT #1: Now in order to post anonymously a member must have at least 4 SBs AND a ratio (SB/SB+MS) over 0.70. This will not prevent some people hiding behind anonymous posting to say something inflammatory, but at the very least there is a bit more of a hurdle to use the feature and someone can lose it easily if they abuse it and get too many MS. This also prevents some of the more opinionated users that like to debate incessantly (and thus have a ratio of under 0.70) to use the anonymous feature to get more aggressive. It won't be perfect but I think this is a good first step...let's see how it goes.
ANNOUNCEMENT #2: We have 3x'd the number of times our mods check the forums throughout the day to continually move stuff out of the IB forums that don't belong there (school ranking threads) and to more aggressively no bump de-emphasize prestige discussion threads to make sure that our ~2-3 AMA / more informative posts don't drown in the noise and that the professional users continue to get value out of WSO.
ANNOUNCEMENT #3: We're trying to get a new filter live today that allows all new threads to be identified by region. So if someone is talking/asking about IB on the west coast, they would select USA - W...if someone is talking about London PE, the UK filter would get selected, etc... We've already identified the 25 regions (many subregions) that make the most sense based on our traffic patterns and are working fast to try and get this live today (with pretty flags by next week). One of the challenging/fun parts is running a script across all 500,000+ discussions to try and tag as many of them with these regional filters as possible based on keywords (my guess is the script will be able to successfully tag ~50,000-80,000 successfully but I'll keep you all posted).
The goal here will be to allow all site visitors to curate regional content more easily to regions they care about. So the UK folk that don't care about US topics can just focus on UK stuff, and vice versa...same with Canada, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, etc...
All of this stuff won't be perfect at first go around so thank you for your patience!
Patrick
I like the idea behind this. Only concern I have is that those will less popular opinions (whether political, economic, or otherwise) will have their anonymity stripped- could be sort of aggressive and promote a group-think mentality. I do see how it can stop people from trolling though- I guess we will see how this works its way through the forums.
People are already anonymous in the most important way: nobody knows their true identities. Allowing additional anonymous posting was well intentioned but ultimately a huge mistake; participants in networks, particularly content-based ones, crave at least some kind of credit / ability to connect on some level with other participants. Anonymity killed that and I think it’s really smart he’s rolling part of that back
As someone who only cares about uk centric forums, the location feature is gonna be reallyyy useful. Cheers patrick.
It's now live in a very basic sense for new threads we ask for region but we're not making it required until we pretty it up and have the filters ready...so probably more like end of next week for that.
this is live/done
Cheers Patrick and WSO, can't wait for this to happen - however, 4 SBs seem a bit low, doesn't it?
Already live... Yes, 4sbs low on purpose (new members that have something sensitive to share that don't want it tied back to their account) but if those 4sbs come with 2 ms, they still won't have the option available to them.
Hmmm, looks like my ratio is 68.9%. I would just like to announce that I find Donald Trump and Joe Biden to be perfectly equally cromulent. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
ha, I promise not on purpose. I honestly think 0.70 is a fairly easy to hit if you stay clear of political threads (or at least stay respectful within them) and are giving advice as much as you are trying to win an argument (remember, arguing has the downside of bumping threads that are annoying to the vast majority of readers until mods can manually no bump it).
I know there are some more active members on here that don't hit that like LBObuyout above, but I don't think many of them care if their username is hidden or not (if they do then I'm concered about what they are trying to post)...
Based on what I've seen, below a 0.70 USUALLY means ONE or more of the following is true:
1) You enjoy political discourse and will defend your side to the death against anonymous people online rather than try to understand their approach/perspective and share yours respectively :-)
2) You are immature
3) You're a troll
4) When you do disagree, you write hastily without thinking about how your comments will be interpretted
5) You make sexist / racist or other inappropriate comments on the boards
0.70 is arbitrary, but remember this isn't some ban on posting, it's just a feature you don't get to use until you've demonstrated a bit less combativeness.
Anyways, this is all still being evaluated.
Thanks, Patrick
Haha, unpossible! I also think any viewpoint left of center, mild or not, was getting an unbalanced load of MS, but that seems to have balanced out in recent months. I think this is a good feature to most importantly stop harassment and misinformation, which this rule will do.
A limit on # of anonymous posts for each user is also ideal even if they meet the ratio criteria; like how the system caps me when I go on a tear and throw too much MS. It sucks when I am talking to a bunch of people with the username Prospective; A0; A1.
Something like 5 anonymous comments a week is being generous.
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