I have made a decision to alter and/or remove various restrictions on Voat. I’ve thought a lot about this and it’s something both @Atko and I believe needs to be reevaluated.
Voat has always had a problem with spam. @Amalek would spam posts and hijack the new queue making it unusable. MH101 and then later @SaneGoatiSwear would hijack comment pages making them unusable. The rules Voat uses were put in place in to combat this behavior. They are old rules, mostly remaining unchanged from the initial versions of this site. Most, if not all, of the rules were in direct response to spam attacks. It was never Voat’s intention to limit non-spam accounts, but this is what has happened as an indirect result of these rules.
Voat will not keep in place a system that permanently limits a segment of users from debating and conversing. This isn’t Free Speech as I see it or as I want it.
Voat will shortly be going live with a new code base, and I want to have a new system designed and ready for when this happens, so I am posting this announcement to get feedback from the community.
The main areas of concern:
- Commenting restrictions on negative CCP accounts that aren't spamming their comments
- Limiting any account that spam comments
TL;DR
We need to allow unpopular opinions while preventing comment spam.
How do we do it?
All options are on the table
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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123_456 ago
HEY, LISTEN!
I've got an idea that could work, but I don't know if you can implement this. Please patent this for our website, so reddit can't use it. Ha-ha.
This is how it goes:
1 - Comments, and submissions have a report spam button. People click that button.
2 - The report goes to the sidebar, or another area of the website, and it asks RANDOM users if it's spam. They can voluntarily click to verify if it's spam. This way the power to judge something isn't in the hands of a few people.
3 - If a user's account gets too many verifications of spam, then they will be banned. However, if they want to, they can appeal, and ask for an un-banning.
4 - Of course what will motivate random users to moderate? Users will get points, and badges for identifying spam.
So, this is almost like the system we have now, except moderation is in the hands of many users. It's not necessarily bullet proof, but it leads us away from certain groups, and a few powerful people ganging up on an individual.
ForgotMyName ago
A lot of spam is cut & paste. I think we can do a lot to combat spam simply by factoring in a user's history when a report comes through.
10281474? ago
Voat already checks to see if comments you made were literally just "Cut and pasted" into the comment box, particularly if you've done it shortly after a previous comment.