Ask the Mods questions about the Forums!

[Snark]

On 8/16/2018 at 6:52 AM, adsii1970 said:

I had no idea. What I do hate is on the mobile app (Android, in Bing's mobi browser) it is really easy to hit the like button and have the post liked and your action removed all in one poke. Not only is it frustrating...

We're not going to jump down someone's throat for an occasional innocent mistake.  It's generally pretty obvious when someone is deliberately abusing stuff.

And we do try to give people the benefit of the doubt, where possible (for moderation in general, not just this).  Actual warns and bans are generally very well earned.

On 8/16/2018 at 1:04 AM, steve_v said:

I wonder if there is a rate-limit on that... Tempting to script up a wee test.

As @Vanamonde already pointed out, please don't.  That sort of thing is exactly what we mean when we say "don't abuse the forums".  We try to give people the benefit of the doubt, as I say-- but that would be the kind of behavior that, well, removes doubt in a hurry.    We'd hate to have to take decisive action to stop such a thing.

[The Minmus Derp]

Is a post that has just this:

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Allowed?

Edited August 18, 2018 by Snark
Unnecessary giant font reduced by moderator

[Snark]

37 minutes ago, The Minmus Derp said:

Is a post that has just this:

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Allowed?

No, it isn't.  Please see forum rule 2.2.m.  Forum posts-- here, or anywhere else-- are supposed to have actual content.  A simple filler like that isn't saying anything and doesn't do anything other than clutter up the forum and get in the way of people's enjoyment.  In addition to rule 2.2.m prohibiting contentless posts, making a post like that in someone's thread would also break rule 2.2.o, since it's off-topic.

A final note:  making posts that deliberately use giant font is fairly rude to fellow forum members.  It doesn't contribute anything, wastes screen space, and is generally jarring and hard on the eyes.  People generally come here because they're interested in KSP, not looking to be shouted at.  So please don't do that, out of consideration for others.

So for those reasons, no, a post like that wouldn't be allowed.  Glad you asked, so now you know.  Good thing nobody's planning on making any posts like that, isn't it? 

(We've taken the liberty of reducing the 72-point font in the above message, accordingly.  Thank you for your understanding.  For future reference, if you've got a question about that, you don't actually need to insert 72-point text in a message.  For example, you could just ask "Would it be okay to make a contentless post using giant font that fills up the page with one word?"  To which the answer is, "no".) 

[adsii1970]

32 minutes ago, The Minmus Derp said:

Is a post that has just this:

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Allowed?

This...

5 minutes ago, Snark said:

No, it isn't.

As a forum member who uses other forums, there's nothing worse than four or five posts of random things posted where they really do not fit. It's like having a conversation among a group of friends and someone decides to interrupt the flow of the conversation with some obscure thing. Just today, another prof and I were talking about Kerbal Space Program at work (he's a upper level math prof and we challenge each other in a stock game) and someone came up and began talking about the new John Madden PS4 football game... Yeah that moment...

Now, back on to a question about the forum I have. There are times the text editor will randomly pop up with a post I started and didn't finish for some reason. But here lately, it's been cross-threads. And what I mean by that is when I came here to ask this question (and was sidetracked by Snark's great answer to a forum question), here's what was in my screen:

Quote

No, it's ok... I forgot about it.

And apparently I really did. I don't even remember what post it was from and how long ago I was typing it. So, how long does data stay in this suspended animation of the forum? And why does it randomly choose which stuff to save? Sometimes it even saves posts I've actually posted - and they'll pop into the strangest threads...

[Vanamonde]

I'm sorry, but we have no insights on the weirdness of the retained partial posts. Though I do see that quotebox weirdnesses seem to be rarer these days. Anyway, I haven't seen it retain text from another thread, so that would seem to be new. 

[adsii1970]

1 minute ago, Vanamonde said:

I'm sorry, but we have no insights on the weirdness of the retained partial posts. Though I do see that quotebox weirdnesses seem to be rarer these days. Anyway, I haven't seen it retain text from another thread, so that would seem to be new. 

Thanks for such a speedy reply. If it keep up, I will take screen shots and report it, I guess...

[HansonKerman]

So, what's up with all the users who have "Never" visited or left the day they joined???

[cubinator]

28 minutes ago, HansonKerman said:

So, what's up with all the users who have "Never" visited or left the day they joined???

Bots, probably, or the thousands of people who post one question about their game and then disappear forever.

[Deddly]

Yep. Some of them are sleeper bots as well, hoping we won't notice when they eventually start posting (we will) and some put spam in their profiles hoping to improve their Google ranking or something. 

[HansonKerman]

Do status updates count toward post count?

[Gargamel]

4 hours ago, cubinator said:

Bots, probably, or the thousands of people who post one question about their game and then disappear forever.

Search engines also use 'spiders'.  A type of bot that just crawls over every link it can find.  A lot of the guest users you see on forums are just spiders correlating the site for their search results.  Some have even been programmed to create accounts for the forums that require them to even view posts.   Back in the day, on another forum I used to be a mod on, we had to contact yahoo and ask them to only send a few of them, as they were filling up our user lists, even though you didn't need an account to view.  Within a month or so, the number of random signups had dropped.   This was before Captcha was used a lot, and one of the reasons it is used a lot now. 

[adsii1970]

33 minutes ago, HansonKerman said:

Do status updates count toward post count?

In my experience, yes. But I am not a moderator.

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

Can we skirt the censor on the name of the mod hosting site that was a precursor to SpaceDock for descriptive purposes (no links)?

I was trying to answer this question:

By telling the history of SpaceDock, but all the instances of the precursor's name were turned into "*" and I'm not 100% sure about why it was censored. I think I recall it was to break links to the possibly now malicious site, but I'm not sure.

Could I get permission to skirt the filter with spaces, dashes, or something similar as long as I say not to try to go to the site, and don't include the top level domain?

[Deddly]

18 hours ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

Can we skirt the censor on the name of the mod hosting site that was a precursor to SpaceDock for descriptive purposes (no links)?

You are quite correct that the name of the site was censored because it is now a malicious site and dangerous to browse. The available moderators have discussed this, and in the context you're talking about, we don't object to you using the name without actually linking to it, as long as you point out that the site is dangerous, as you suggest. I'll add that there are not so many moderators online right now, so it's possible that as a group, we will come to a different conclusion later on. But for now, go ahead until you hear otherwise.

Thank you so much for asking us before going ahead and doing it.

 

[4x4cheesecake]

So, it happens to me quiet often that I accidentally hit 'submit reply' via the key combination 'ctrl + enter' when I actually just want to create a slingle-line break via 'shift+enter'...

I'm pretty sure to know the answer to my question but: Is it possible to remap the keys (or deactivate a key combination) individually so every user can use different keys?

[Snark]

48 minutes ago, 4x4cheesecake said:

Is it possible to remap the keys (or deactivate a key combination) individually so every user can use different keys?

I believe that no, it isn't.  It's just how the forum software's written, and I don't see any individual user account or profile settings for remapping keys.

[4x4cheesecake]

34 minutes ago, Snark said:

I believe that no, it isn't.  It's just how the forum software's written, and I don't see any individual user account or profile settings for remapping keys.

Yeah, that's what I've expected...I was hoping for a 'secret' URL which brings up a settings page, like: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/kerbalize-your-forum-experience

Thank you Snark, I guess I have to look for an browser addon.

Edited August 20, 2018 by 4x4cheesecake

[Mad Rocket Scientist]

5 hours ago, Deddly said:

You are quite correct that the name of the site was censored because it is now a malicious site and dangerous to browse. The available moderators have discussed this, and in the context you're talking about, we don't object to you using the name without actually linking to it, as long as you point out that the site is dangerous, as you suggest. I'll add that there are not so many moderators online right now, so it's possible that as a group, we will come to a different conclusion later on. But for now, go ahead until you hear otherwise.

Thank you so much for asking us before going ahead and doing it.

Thanks for giving me permission, I'll update my post soon.

While looking around at the history, it looks there are still links to it on this thread:

On the last page. I'm not sure if that's intentional or not, but I though you might want to know.

Edited August 20, 2018 by Mad Rocket Scientist

[Snark]

18 hours ago, Mad Rocket Scientist said:

While looking around at the history, it looks there are still links to it on this thread

Thanks for the heads up.    All tidied up now.

[Cassel]

Can we have new rule for suggestion section? Advertising mods/add-ons there should be forbidden.

 

[Snark]

1 hour ago, Cassel said:

Can we have new rule for suggestion section? Advertising mods/add-ons there should be forbidden.

Thank you for the suggestion!

In general, we try to have as few rules as possible, since we like people to feel fairly free to post what they want.  Any rule is a restriction on our users, which in general we'd prefer not to do unless necessary.  Also, bear in mind that any time there's an additional rule, that's one more thing that we moderators need to enforce, which takes our time.  And there are only a few of us, and we're doing this in our spare time-- we can't afford to be a "police state".  So for both of these reasons, we try to be as parsimonious with rules as we can.

When we do consider adding a rule, therefore, we take a hard and skeptical look at it-- i.e., is it really necessary?  Is there a significant and common problem that it would address?  Is the benefit to the community worth the extra restrictions placed on the users, and the extra time and effort the moderator team would need to enforce it?

In this particular case, I'm having trouble seeing the justification for such a rule.  The Suggestions forum seems to do pretty well, people make suggestions all the time, most of the discussion there seems to be around those suggestions.  And naturally, people often suggest things that there exists a mod to address, and there's nothing wrong with people pointing that out.  "There's a mod for that" isn't a solution to a suggestion-- since the suggestion is about the stock game, after all-- but there's nothing wrong with mentioning a mod, as a way of potentially helping the suggester around a problem, at least until such time as the stock game hopefully incorporates the suggestion.

So overall, I'd be inclined not to add such a rule-- it seems to me to be trying to "solve" a problem that doesn't actually exist, as far as I can tell.

Of course, I could be wrong.    It's not as though I read every single post that ever gets posted there.  If you've got examples where you think there's a real problem, please do point them out-- though I'd ask that you do so privately to the moderators, since this forum's not about publicly pointing fingers at people.  If it's just one or two, reporting the offending posts is probably the right way to go.  If you think you have a whole bunch of examples, maybe better in a PM with a list of links, just so we don't get our report queue spammed. 

[Cassel]

41 minutes ago, Snark said:

 

When we do consider adding a rule, therefore, we take a hard and skeptical look at it-- i.e., is it really necessary? 

 

More than half threads in the suggestion section as the first post has "there is a mod for that", as for me it is at least off-topic, but purposeful.

If it happened once in 100 threads it's ok, no problem, but check how often this happens. I understand that someone may want to advertise their mod/add-on, but there is also a section devoted to add-ons.
If someone really wants to show that some suggestions already exist in the form of an add-on, he can create a thread in another part of the forum and then people looking for add-ons will benefit from it.

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Cassel said:

More than half threads in the suggestion section as the first post has "there is a mod for that",

Sure.  That's because it's a natural human reaction to propose that, by people who are trying to be helpful.  They're not necessarily trying to "advertise"-- most of the time, my observation has been that it's not actually the mod author pointing it out.  They're simply trying to be helpful.

And even if you don't care for such posts yourself, it can be helpful to others.  Not everybody agrees on what they want to see.  It's not as though pointing out "there's a mod for that" is damaging the thread or shutting down discussion.  It might or might not be helpful, depending on context and what the OP's intentions are, but it doesn't seem to be hurting much.

Certainly I've seen plenty of suggestion threads where someone says "by the way, if you're interested here's a mod that does that", and the OP was vocally grateful for it.

And I've hardly ever seen a suggestion thread get completely derailed by something like this, or erupt in a major flame war, or cause other toxic problems that damage the forums.

Therefore... I'd be inclined to let this one lie.  I simply don't see the need for such a rule-- I don't see that would be especially helpful, it might actually hurt in some cases, and it would be a burden to enforce.

[Chel]

What would happen if the forum was hacked? 

[Vanamonde]

Depends on how it was hacked. Bad things, presumably.