Hopefully...

When you punish 100% of posts to catch 10% of posts you increase your work, not decrease it :/

The main thing this will do is slow the rate of posts down in the thread.

Considering all the action pretty much stayed in one thread you were way ahead of many other discussion forums. With everything in one place it's pretty easy to moderate if you can effectively make decisions on posts.

Now will we have posts appearing way back in the sequence after we've already moved past that in our read index?

Unless you force posts to be approved serially you'll have this problem.

Now indecisive action on posts will mean they lag more than others and the conversation gets all disjointed

Dangerous "misinformation" I'm curious as to how this will be determined?? Mod review opinions? Misinformation comes in many forms all of which will appeal and seem feasible to some even those who possess the power. It comes down to rather they agree with what you have to say or not which will control whether it's a post or not seems like a vast dark room to me.

Moderating on a whole new level! Could this be the prototype for the future? guess we will see...

Pretty much any thread that has the slowdown applied to I won't bother posting in.

If snopes does not agree....

According to Gary Stern, 75% of pinball buyers are Republicans. I think that stat generally sounds accurate from what I’ve seen on pinside. I also think that that inherent internal bias, conscious or not, will show through in the “approved” posts. Subtle and not so subtle conservative talking points float by unnoticed on this sight all the time. Anti-government program, anti-regulation, Misogyny, anti-gay, trans “jokes” just sit in many threads and are not, apparently, considered political or hate speech.

I’m all for safety related modding, but then kicking people out of threads for posting the actual words of political leaders that are also spreading misinformation? Bias.

Good luck with the pre approval but you’ve got deeper issues on this site.

Basically, things that are just completely outlandish and dangerous. Something like claiming that injecting bleach or essential oils into yourself would cure the virus (which it won't and which could seriously harm or kill someone).

Part of the problem was that people were throwing political comments/opinions into posts, which would then trigger other people to respond to those comments, and then a landslide of political comments would get started. This would sometimes happen in a matter of minutes before any moderators had a chance to step in.

The idea is to try to prevent that from happening from the get-go, rather than just cleaning up after it and leaving a bunch of people upset because they were moderated and/or booted from the thread. A common response to a moderation warning in those situations has typically been along the lines of "but I was only responding to xyz".

Yes, that's been general idea. But the volume of posts and high number rule violations still made it challenging and time consuming.

It shouldn't. As posts are approved, they will appear as new posts.

We'll try to move through them as quickly as possible. In most cases, posts will likely be approved.

As always, anyone is welcome and encouraged to use the "report post" button in the lower right hand corner of posts that they think might be violating the forum rules.

Sounds political!

And that is just fine. I was skipping hundreds of posts at a time anyway. So if I was reading it 3 times a day, and still ended up skipping hundreds of posts, it was out of control.

Is this a perfect solution? Nope, but it is an attempt at a solution, and that is progress.

Yeah, hurt my poor sensibilities and may be disinformation. Post should have been pre-approved to protect me from myself...

This sounds good, hopefully the moderators will be able to keep up with new posts!

That's the point. And the downvotes also strengthen the point.

As for reporting posts, either the mods are too busy or don't have the same view of said posts to deem them as problematic which again, bolsters my point.

I'm not sure how this saves mods any time either...isn't the time looking at a post prior to approval the same as reading it already posted?

It's the troll feeding and resulting arguments that are the time sink. Someone says something stupid, political or religious and there are five people just itching to respond and so on.

Quarantine the stupid so that only the essential posts get to go out in public.

Indeed - the initial post may actually not even be stupid or trolling, but can be read as political or inflammatory, triggering a chain (over)reaction. That's what we want to avoid (especially at times when not many mods are awake).

Sweet! Now the mods can save me from posting my drunken posts.

This is all completely unnecessary. Regarding the coronavirus thread, if the mods would have continued to enforce the ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY as outlined by ForceFlow, the problems in that thread would have been ELIMINATED DAYS AGO. It was the same handful of Pinsiders that for whatever reason were not ejected when they should have been according to the rules. The Pinside staff simply made more work for themselves by not enforcing their own rules. The problems would have been resolved in less time than it took Robin to type his initial post in this thread, not to mention all the thought and back end work to make these unnecessary changes. The time that will be spent by the staff on the post approval process will far exceed the time spent to make a few more thread ejections. The clear solution was to enforce the existing rules, NOT create new ones.

Here's an additional suggestion. The Re-Birth of RGP, (Rec Games Pinball).
RGP is an old Google group for pinball that has been abandoned in favor of Pinside. It has ZERO moderators there and it's a Pinball forum. It's easy to join with an email and you obsessed, political instigators could live the remainder of your lives there.

Someone could begin a thread and call it whatever you like. "Pinside Democrats V Republicans", for example.
Link: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.games.pinball

Cool that’s a thread I started 7 years ago, I hit the big time. Haha

The new Pinside crackdown will work only for the Covid thread and I agree it will most likely cause the Moderators more work and not less. And I will predict that our problem children will continue the political tension and war into other threads as they have always done.

This is more work for you guys. It is a shame you cannot just stick with thread ejects when posters break rules. Keep it simple. This just seems overly complicated.

Funny, I see it the exact opposite. Most people mind their business, but you and your group of activists can't help but make snide, underhanded remarks and turn everything into a political issue, including your post here. There is no place for it here....it's pinball.

'I was responding..' to a known bad topic = guilty. End of line

Killing the cadence of a conversation hurts the flow. Breaking up the sequence of a conversation is even worse.

I don't think you followed my concern. It boils down to if he puts posts in the thread but just hides them (they go in order made) or if he puts all posts into a SEPARATE QUEUE and then they get added to the real thread based on when they are approved.

The post order will vary between the two models. The explanation that you will see your posts just marked as not approved yet suggests that the posts are actually in-line in the thread, just awaiting to be toggled to be visible. robin ??

And this is why you deal with the problem... not punish everyone.

If it's trolling... just squash the source. Yes there are some 'multiplication factors' ... But its less work than approving EVERY POST.

Is this a personal attack?

I see your point but I don't think it will be a significant issue. Posts will mostly be approved in chronological order - an exception could be a post for which we hesitate and ask other mods or one with a link to a long video some mod wants to watch first.

Technically, it's quite fast - you read a post and it's one click - less than one second... It would be more work if none of the mods was remotely interested in the topic and would not have the thread at all, except for abuse reports

I wish things were that cut and dry. But they are never that cut and dry when it comes to humans. You can easily eliminate the worst offenders, but then you get into people that are much closer to the line. And those get into a gray area. If you simply say "exterminate" like a Dalek, everyone within 25% of the line on either side gets ejected. So you end up with 1/4 of the people even left to participate. So really you have already gutted any discussion that may have happened. If people could control themselves and weren't dinks "the problems in that thread would have been ELIMINATED DAYS AGO". And instead we end up with "pre-moderation" (a term coined by DaveH himself).

It will be a problem for the very reason you keep saying other posts will be fast... if you are fast, anything you need to 'consult' over means it will fall back in the pack... destroying readability/awareness of posts.

Conversation is meant to be a synchronous flow... when you pause it or reorder it or cause people to skip parts of it... you hinder conversation.

It's fundamentally a bad way to moderate posts... just deal with the source of the problem.

I've read most of that thread from the start... if one person can do it, don't see why a team of people can't do it if you actually can moderate posts on your own without a team huddle.

That is easier said than done, which is why this whole situation has been difficult to manage. Any which way things go, folks get upset.

The issue is that this is a world-wide and largely unprecedented event that affects *everyone*. Trying to stop all discussion about it would be impossible since it is affecting every area of life. Consequently, people want to discuss it. Hence the go-to thread where people can discuss it.

Even shutting down the thread for just a few days lead to several new threads being posted about that, as well as many moderator feedback threads expressing opinions or asking questions about the decision.

We don't *want* to boot people from the thread, and we don't enjoy excluding people from discussions. But we will and we have when necessary. Part of the issue is that government actions and political leaders are heavily involved with this event. It's sometimes hard to find a clear-cut separation, so a lot of posts end up in a gray area, and it's not always clear about whether or not a post is in violation of a forum rule. And honestly, we feel bad about having to boot someone for a minor comment when they've otherwise been following the rules the whole time.

Additionally, when a post gets moderated, there are also sometimes unseen results from that. It generally leads to moderator feedback threads expressing questions, opinions and/or outrage, and/or emails to Robin. Additionally, some people who have been moderated and/or booted (even temporarily) don't take it well, so sometimes they go off and misbehave in other threads, leading to more work for us.

It's tough to strike the right balance.

We are constantly evaluating the situation. If we find that post approvals are working, then great. If not, we may review other possible options.

I just want to say I've drained all the covid threads that come up and really enjoy coming to Pinside for my break from covid. It really is a respite.

How will the determination be made as to whether a thread is put into pre-approval mode? By the title and first post, by someone injecting something inappropriate into an otherwise rule-abiding thread, or something else? I just want to understand how this is going to work.

The only way to win is to not play the game.

For one thing, this isn't a chat room--it's a forum. There will always be a delay of some sort. Some threads have had a discussion gap of years before someone picks it up again.

There is a big difference between just passively reading or skimming the thread, and actively reading and evaluating each post for potential issues.

As jlm mentioned, posts are being reviewed in the order in which they are posted to the thread. If, as you say, one post takes longer to evaluate than others, it will be minutes, not hours or days for a moderator to simply hit the yay or nay button on it.

If the pinside ministry of truth is going to be the biproduct of the covid thread, than I personally would just prefer to have it closed.

I can't think of one useful thing I learned from that thread that I didn't already know for myself.

We don't have formal guidelines as of yet, but the general idea is to only use it if there's a thread with serious problems that also needs to remain open.

I really don't see it actually getting a whole lot of use for two main reasons: there aren't very many threads like that and it is extra work for us. So, the threshold for putting it into effect would have to be pretty high, like in the case of the covid thread.

More fake news as he didn't say that. Please check your facts. (Something like) are hardly facts. You R part of the problem spreading misinformation, please moderate yourself.

You are under no obligation to participate in discussions. However, as mentioned above, there are many people who do wish to participate and discuss these current events.

We're not going very far into "fact checking" territory. There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding current events, and frankly, we don't have the time to investigate and nitpick every detail. So, as I mentioned a few posts back, only some of the most egregious and obvious falsehoods will not be allowed.

You are making assumptions and have misread my post. I simply provided an example of what would be considered obviously untrue and not allowed. Unfortunately, that is an example I have seen being spread around on twitter and facebook.

Announcing drains is against the rules!!! Just kidding, I did the same

Here I fixed it for you so it is factually correct tp

Something like claiming that [exposing the inside of your body to UV rays] or [injecting disinfectents] would cure the virus (which it won't and which could seriously harm or kill someone).

Energy and activity are the lifeblood of a discussion forum. There is a reason the 'on fire' icon means something to people passing by..

False Equivalency. The gap is not in a continuous conversation. That's other people finding a similar conversation.

You guys have been over complicating the job for years... tooling wasn't the problem. I've done the role for nearly 30yrs.. I'm aware of what it takes.

We will just have to see I guess...

I am concerned that this new moderation "tool" will be abused in the future once we all have forgotten about the covid thread. It is also a very slippery slope downhill when you give the power of a few to decide what is true for the many. If something is so obviously false than the reader should know better for themselves.

Anyway, think I made my point. I just hope its heard and considered.

I really want to go on a rant here, responding to a few of the member posts.
But I won't, because it won't help.

So I'll just say that I think Robin and the UNPAID VOLUNTEER mods do a pretty good job of keeping things from going off the rails around here.
If you really have to post about political or social events, go to a forum dedicated to those topics.
I like the mostly pinball and a few other things discussion around here.
It also does not personally offend me if someone posts something that I don't agree with. I might think that person is an idiot, but I try to mostly keep that to myself.

We all have opinions, each as personally valid as the next.

While you spoke with him, did he by any chance tell you the percentage that prefers crunchy peanut butter to creamy? Or the percentage of people who's favorite color is blue?