Psychopath 2018-10-01 19:31:42 (Updated 2018-10-01 19:47:54)

They also don't cover things that have always been against the rules, like leaving a review soliciting people to blam a submission. Getting a mod's input, or @TomFulp, on whether or not they'd remove reviews according to how they offend the rules the way they used to be written is important to know, because we're effectively hobbled if we're to follow the way they're written now to the absolute letter because there are few objective ways, if any, to scrutinize a review that's been marked for abuse. It also broadens the definition of what counts as abusive when before it was narrowly bottle-necked. It both closes off and opens up whole categories of reviews that can be removed. If someone wrote "Blam this", you instantly knew it violated the rules because it was listed therein, not anymore though.

These new rules are literally fortune cookie length.

Psychopath 2018-10-01 22:45:56 (Updated 2018-10-02 13:14:08)

Does that mean you and other mods will remove reviews that break the rules the way they were written before or does that mean the rules are so subjective now that you can just decide what is and isn't against the rules depending on how you feel? How do we determine what an abusive review is going forward?

More importantly, how do I determine, by review mod standards, what is and isn't an abusive review? You expressed that even though the review doesn't technically break the rules that it's going to be deleted once your tools are restored but that review only violates the old rules set, are you going by the old rules or is are you deleting it because the new rules simply allow you to because you feel like it and not because the rules mandate it? This information going forward for the Whistle Cow Crew is important to know, because I can easily see myself collecting old, one line reviews that read as "this sucks" only to have them brushed off your queue by a moderator who likes to play rule lawyer by pointing out that nothing marked for abuse by us technically counts as abusive, followed by everyone's whistle status bombing because said hypothetical asshole mod was feeling spiteful that day.

I know that before this rule change that review mods had their own hidden categories of reviews that you'd delete if you found them, such as reviews written in languages that aren't English. With that in mind, getting an idea of how review mods are going to treat this rule change is important, because now these new rules allow mods to scrutinize purely through their opinions. I really don't see how we can adjust to this with any measurable success.

Let's say I find a review like the one I described in this blog post, someone telling the author to pick up their shit and GTFO. If I were to flag it and then paste the old rules in the body of the message, followed by an archive link to the old rules, [which is exactly what I did] would a moderator abide by that or would they throw it out because it's no longer official?

Psychopath 2018-10-02 06:45:31

I wouldn't allow users to use the review space to reply to each other because that's not what it's for, you're to stay on topic and review the content in question and not someone else's review. You're too hung up on "blam this" as a specific example, since there's a multitude of ways I could incite other people to zero bomb a submission, and declaring it doesn't belong on the site is one of them. The point I made with bringing it up is that it made it clear and concise that getting people to vote out of malicious intent to drop a submission's score was against the rules and the written example of "Blam this!" itself was an ironclad and indisputable offense that mods couldn't simply disregard because they personally disagree with our subjective definition of what counts as abuse.

Any forum I've ever visited with fortune cookie length rules like this usually end up descending into chaos because nobody can agree as to what the limits are when concerning their own rules, and they'll play fast and loose with their personal standards. Whether or not a review counts as abusive should not be a guessing game to the people reporting it and especially not to the people scrutinizing those reports.