Outage and comments, comments, comments
Couple things. We were down late last night for 3133t h4x0r-related reasons. I wish they’d fricking get their attacks co-ordinated at least, and decide whether they want the site up so they can fight me and my anti-comment-spamming tricks, or if they want to try and use the hosting company to launch DoS attacks on their IRC buddies or whatever’s angered them that day.
In other comment news — I got some pretty nasty flack over deleting a lot of comments w/r/t steroids and another thread. “I don’t appreciate you deleting my comments” “You [foul adjective] [insulting noun]” and so forth. So, two responses, in general, and one specifically. First, the comment guidelines are pretty clear about what’s going to get deleted.
Second, if on a topic there is an even more specific note that says “please, do not do x here,” I have no sympathy for people who feel insulted or hurt because they did x and their comment got deleted. If you inadvertantly kick something off and I prune too enthusiastically, particularly if you did so before a note like that, sure, that sorta sucks, and generally I try to drop a note and say “sorry”. Sometimes I’m too busy deleting stuff.
Third, insulting people in general. People have taken offense at some of my judgements about what crosses the line for civil dialogue. This seems to be particularly frequent when someone’s going after site mgmt and they’re warned about tone. I’ll say this — I really do regard USSM as a never-ending get-together (like the Feed!) except without the face-to-face and the pizza. If someone’s at a party and starts to harangue the hosts (“I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a long time — you stink! And… this free booze is terrible! And there’s not enough of it!”)… yeah. If theyre comparing someone to something for the direct purpose of embarassing them or associating the target with something bad, even if no one’s swearing, it’s running up on the whole civil dialogue thing again, and the party hosts get to be judge of when someone gets asked to leave.
Okay, and four — we have been extremely slow to put down bans for being an assbag in general. Spamming comments to promote sleazy products, instant ban, yes. Jerkishness has gotten a long, long leash. People we knew were eventually going to be banned got a lot of rope.
Which actually brings me to five — I know that the disappearing nature of comments must make this seem strange from the user side sometimes. People sometimes write out reasoned, kind replies to morons and see the post is gone before they’re done with their reply. I’m sorry. Some people who got banned for being assbags spend their energy off-site, claiming they’ve been wronged for espousing particular views, when there was actually a comment seen by (say) me and Dave and ten, fifteen readers that finally forced us to get the stick out — and because we don’t have a hall of shame or something, if anyone wanted to figure it out they’d have to go back through that user’s post and extrapolate what they probably said in the deleted posts.
Allllllllll of that said, I think the discussion’s been going well. I wish it took a little less time to run, obviously.
Continuing outages
I’ve been hoping this would clear up before I felt like I had to post about it, but — yes, our provider’s been having problems, resulting in people getting no page/database cannot connect messages/etc.
Sorry. They’re aware of it, the server’s being looked at, so… we’ll see, I guess. I’m not sure at this point if I need to work up a spec sheet and then start asking people for hosting recommendations or just chill for a while, and since I’ve got so much else to do, I think I’m going to chill.
Anyway — apologies, as always, for the troubles. I’m working on it.
If I seem like I’m in a bad mood today…
… forgive me, please, because I am.
Someone’s been spamming comments for days now. You don’t get to see a lot of this, hopefully, but it’s really frustrating. I think some tweaking nailed that down, but uuuggghhh.
And theeeeeeeen today was a banner day for bizarre flame wars and people dragging in stuff from elsewhere on the net, which meant I got to delete a lot of comments, after which *they started right back up*. So to you folks:
If you want to go insult each other on the PI Forum, or where ever you came from, knock yourself out. This is not your playground where you can schedule fights. Go away.
For more details, I recommend our comments guidelines.
And to everyone else who stayed out of it, thank you. Really.
Site work update
It’s close to nine now, and I’ve completed all the stuff I felt I had to get done. Comment protection is now… well, it’s pretty brutal, though until it can actually reach out and beat the stuffing out of people it’s not as brutal as I’d like.
I have not yet relaxed the controls I put in the first time, so the caveats about AOL issues still apply. All told, today’s site upgrades probably took 2 hours of actual futzing with stuff beyond time spent figuring out how to get them to work and integrated without there being anything obvious that you, the reader, would notice. Which now that I write, that, seems kind of dumb. I should have put blinking “Derek pwnz!!” tags everywhere or something. Anyway–
Let me know if you see anything out of the ordinary, particularly with comments. I did not get to some of the more wonkier stuff I’d hoped to get to, but that’s life. Anyone who wants to talk to me about MySQL, WordPress, and the stranger corners of performance optimization can drop me a line. I’m off to worry about the election but I’ll be back soon enough.
Comment attacks
We’ve been coping with one for a couple days now. At least Party Poker only went after us for a day. Seriously, what’s the scoop, a guy can’t run a site in peace? This is like having door-to-door salespeople break into my house and try to sell me vacuums or cosmetics.
Oh! My point — at some point tonight or tomorrow, I’m going to be building some new anti-comment-spam stuff into the site. Should be transparent to you, but you might notice some weird behavior in the comments if you happen by at the wrong moment.
I’d apologize for the inconvenience, but why? It’s not my fault I have to spend time on this BS.
AOL commenting
Real quick — because of the way AOL routes its traffic, getting rid of some particularly heinous trollers has meant that other AOL users have seen their comments delayed, so they get seen by a USSM person before they go live. So if you’re cool, and post a comment that doesn’t immediately appear, don’t sweat it, it’ll show up soon enough. I’m working on trying to figure out how to more specifically target offenders, but in the meantime, sorry for the inconvenience.
Site lateness issues
You may have seen that the USSM is at times slow to respond to specific requests this week, so if you ask for article x, it may not serve that article up to you. We’re getting hammered, which is good, but also… bad. So bear with us.
Randomness
As I wait for something cool to happen in the game…
In the last day (and these numbers are all “known” numbers, there’s a huge chunk of visitors to the site we don’t get information on):
2% of our visitors were from Boeing
2% are from the University of Washington (and Jason and I say: woof!)
1 person was looking for nude pictures of Gabe Kapler (we’ve commented on this before, but there seems to be a weird, small group of people out there looking for naked pictures of Kapler and/or his wife
1 for Giovanni Carrara’s wife
1 for “yellow bracelets supporting neil armstrong” which, uh… not so much
1 person was looking for counterfeit live strong wristbands which is so low I can’t even come up with a reasonable description
First comment attack
First comment spam attack on the site began this morning, advertising Party Poker Online. Thanks, Party Poker, your outstanding business practices have ensured I will never use your service and will actively encourage others to do likewise.
Bans are in place, you shouldn’t notice anything.
Commenting guidlelines
In response to a request for a more clear statement on what resulted in the first bans, I present this. It’s been through a couple revisions already, and will go through more. Last revision was May 17, 2007, to better incorporate our capriciousness.
The U.S.S. Mariner extremely simple comment guidelines
General Conduct
With the launch of our new site, we added a bunch of cool stuff, including comments. I also implemented fun technology that allows us to ban or moderate commenting from certain people. We did this largely because we didn’t want to spend time and energy on building or deploying a registration system, and wanted people to be able to swing by and say what’s on their mind. We ended up deploying registration eventually.
However, this is not a public street corner. While I am a rabid free speech supporter, your natural right to self expression does not require us to publish your opinion and spend bandwith and resources doing so.
We will ban for any reason and for no reason. In order to ban people who are lame, we will inevitably end up banning people who have done nothing wrong. There’s no appeal process. Bans may be permanent, and they may be adjusted to better target specific people, or repealed entirely.
Seriously: no reason will be given. No explanations will be given on who’s banned, why, or when.
The “no reason” section done, here’s my guess at the kind of things that will get people banned.
Abusive behavior towards others. When you post in reply to people, pretend that you are arguing with an umpire.
“You blew that call, he was safe by a mile.” = Okay
“You blow.” = Ejected
Or, if we had a U.S.S. Mariner get-together, we were all eating pizza and drinking beer, having a good time, would yelling your comment get you punched, then or later?
As with anything relating to tone, this is obviously a subjective and lame standard. It will be applied inconsistently: you may see someone get away with something one day and the next week someone’s gone for the same thing. It’s going to happen.
Possible reasons for deletion or banning
What else… posting illegal copyrighted material, spamming links in the comments, whether it’s your site or whatever. Pointing to other sites is fine, and even pointing to related articles on your own site’s been tolerated sometimes, but “come eat at Joe’s” isn’t. There are some sites we particularly don’t like, and we’re not going to say much more on that. Speculation on any player’s use of steroids, that’s going to be gone as soon as we come across it in almost every case. Speculation about another person’s motives for taking a particular position, particularly in a negative and derogatory sense. I hate first/last/nth-comment posts, so just don’t do that. It’s really annoying. So are “I’m drunk/high/whatever right now” posts. And “test” comments are right out – if you’re not sure if a comment’s going to work, assume it will.
Again, though, that’s a non-inclusive list and is intended for you to get a general sense of what kind of comments get sent to the great message board in the sky. There will be posts that seem to violate these guidelines that are up, and posts that are deleted that seem innocous. If you can’t live with that, then this is not a place you’re going to be happy posting at.
With all that said, this not freep: I do not intend to ban anyone from commenting because they disagree with anyone else, everyone else, or specifcally the viewpoints of any (or all) of the authors. You’re not required to even like me, or Dave, or Jason, or Jeff, though you should like Dave and Jason and Jeff because they’re great guys and I highly recommend them. All you’re required to do is be civil.
On and off-topic comments
If you want to see a link or something discussed posted, email us.
Please, please, don’t just post it in the first thread you come across. This is rude and annoying. It will, almost always, get deleted and make someone mad.
If you’re considering starting a comment with “I know this is off-topic, but–” please, just email the link or topic to us. Don’t hijack a thread.
Except! There are threads where random thoughts, new topics, and events are perfectly allowable. These are the semi-daily game threads during the season. Also, if there’s a thread on, say “news of the day” or “random trade rumors continue” it’s perfectly normal to throw new news or new trade rumors of the day in there. Use your best judgement.
Editing or deleting posts
Comments will be deleted for the same reasons etc. as we’d ban someone. Posts may be deleted but the poster not banned, and a poster might get banned while the comment that provoked it remains up.
Comments will not be altered by editors unless there’s no other way to fix something, and I don’t see how that would be possible.
In some cases, we may edit a post that contains one particularly egregious violation within a larger post that is good enough that we don’t to delete it entirely. This is a judgement call, and we’re going to be inconsistent about it.
Sometimes, we’ll leave a reason for alteration or deletion of the post, in brackets like this:
[deleted, off-topic]
This depends on how swamped we are, and our current mood. Comments are frequently deleted without explanation, particularly in cases when a comment thread has been derailed and it’s unfeasible to do so.
As a courtesy, we ask that you do not fake moderation notes within your comments.
On identification
Fake names are fine. Offensive names and assuming the names of public figures is not, and will get your posts and account deleted. If you’re famous and want to use your real name, email us, and we can work something out.
In particular, pretending you’re a current Mariner player/coach/front office member is not cool. That includes taking their nickname. No “Felix Hernandez” no “King Felix” or anything. If you pick an obscure former non-M’s player, it’ll probably take us a lot longer to get around to asking you to change, since we have more important things on our plates.
Having said all of that stuff about random acts of deletion/banning, I would bet that in almost all circumstances where we have a valid email for your account (which does not show up on the site, please note) and I can drop you a quick note that says “please watch tone” or something, you’re much more likely to get off the hook.
“Why don’t my posts show up?”
There are a couple of reasons. Most likely — especially if you’re a member of a large ISP like AOL or AT&T Worldnet — your comment is sitting in a moderation queue because of a recent spam attack. Or it may be something to do particularly with you: given a couple of deleted posts, for instance, you may be tossed into the moderation queue. There may also be particular one-time characteristics about your post that made the system suspicious.
Either way, a USSM author has to come by, see that you have a comment in the queue, and wave it on into production. Obviously, this is unlikely to happen quickly.
“Regulating tone and civility, especially on the internet, is doomed to failure”
I will not concede this point yet. If I ran a nice sports bar and threw the jerks out every night, I think it’d be a place people who don’t like to be around jerks and want to watch some baseball and have a beer with like-minded people might hang out at. This was our experience without comments: I found the people who read the site and sent us email were almost to a person kind, generous, and intelligent. I have faith that, as at our outings, conversation and debate between our readers can be interesting, civil, and friendly, and if that means I have to hire a particularly aggressive bouncer… well, so be it.
I recognize that at some point if bans are ineffective that the site will be forced to go to registration, or drop comments entirely. We’ll see.
“But I want a good fight with hair-pulling and name-calling!”
Then this is not your site. Major sports web sites have message boards. There are forums all over the place. They offer different crowds and debate flavors, and if this doesn’t sound like your pint of beer, I hope you find one that’s more to your tastes.