Weekend meta: new user registrations
During the Griffey days this week, we had an average of 20 new user registrations a day. Of these: ~3 were Russian comment spammers, ~5 did nothing at all, and ~10 took a run at immediately getting banned (that is, first comment is “You’re all a bunch of stathead whiners in moms basement waaaaaah waaaaaaaaah go cry to mom whois basebment you live in!” and then either: second comment is the same one repeated because they don’t read the little explanatory note, followed by 3-10 repeat comments/complaints about censorship oorrr they ignore the moderation and post more bannable comments until their enthusiasm wanes). And then sometimes, as you probably saw, their first comment’s argumentative but reasonable, so it’s waved in, and then they descend quickly into telling us how gay we all are*.
10 abusive people a day doesn’t seem so bad. But consider we have six people who go through comments as they can, including the three volunteer mods, and through Thursday I could log in at any time during the day and see in the comment queue a sea of yellow to-be-moderated abuse. When someone decides they want to sign up for USSM and be a jerk, there’s no way to expect someone’s going to be by to police a thread for an hour or even really four hours, much as we might try. That’s a long time, and new-user moderation this week was the only thing between us and insanity.
But we’re the only people who see this, I wanted to offer it up as some kind of explanation. If we seemed (and I certainly was) exasperated and curt with some of the more pointed pro-Griffey and anti-Griffey commentary, sorry. It’s because whenever these things happen, we end up coping with a wave of abuse that we all as unpaid volunteers have a hard time dealing with.
And again — we don’t have any problem with discussing this stuff. But no one gets to call Griffey signing-supporters brainless ass-kissers (to pick one) and no one gets to call Griffey signing-detractors heartless robots who’ve never played team sports.
Thanks to everyone who conducted themselves well through this. We really do appreciate it.
* presumably practicing to call people gay over Xbox Live while playing Modern Warfare 2
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Would it seem like I was sucking up if I pointed out the “Donate” button on the upper left?
[ot]
It was Mitch. He was reading a quote from someone else that said Fexlis was a 5.9 WAR player, and interjected that he had no idea what that meant.
It simultaneously made me think that it was cool that some other reporter had mentioned WAR, and also that Mitch doesnt know much about baseball analysis.
Felix*
Well, we all know his real expertise as a “professional” sports broadcaster is in judging his stupid “Bigger Dance” competition every year.
Heh. Well, I certainly would have no problem deleting people out of the mod queue, but I might be a little too heavy handed. On the positive side, since I never contribute anything of significance here — it’s all fundamentally humorous, though not always intentionally — I wouldn’t be taking any of the comments personally. But unless the current mods are feeling overwhelmed (though obviously news about Felix will generate a lot of comments, we aren’t likely to have anything else this offseason that brings out the non-regulars to the extent Griffey does, are we?) I don’t see any way adding me to the mix would result in an improvement.