Timeline for How has RPG.se used protection? (crunching the numbers on spam and protection)
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
36 events
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| Oct 7, 2020 at 20:21 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 22, 2020 at 2:44 | answer | added | user-781943 | timeline score: 4 | |
| Jul 21, 2020 at 22:26 | answer | added | RubiksmooseMod | timeline score: 5 | |
| Jul 21, 2020 at 0:12 | comment | added | user-781943 | @Medix2 Perhaps it's worth manually checking answers with >5 deleted answers (or some metric) and manually counting low rep deletions? It's unlikely for spam accounts to garner a lot of rep in my experience. | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 12:02 | comment | added | Rubiksmoose Mod | @Medix2 this is my understanding as well. We can't get any info on the users of deleted answers, including rep (as you said). | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 11:59 | comment | added | Exempt-Medic | @gszavae As far as I understand it, you'd have to manually look at each deleted answer and check the user's current reputation (there's no way to see past reputation and SEDE doesn't keep user-information on deleted answers so we can't use it either) | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 6:56 | comment | added | user-781943 | @Rubiksmoose Actually I didn't end up calculating the date of the latest deleted answer for each one, I haven't used the data explorer before (I calculated the rest from the spreadsheet), so if you could get that info I'd be thankful! I also saw Oblivious Sage say it couldn't be done, but if we could get stats for deleted answers from users with rep <10 (somehow!) that would be perfect. | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 6:53 | comment | added | user-781943 | @Rubiksmoose It's ok, I got it: 33 had been protected less than 6 months ago, 94 had been protected less than a year ago, 195 had been protected 1-2 years ago, 216 2-3 years ago, 87 3-4 years ago, the remaining 128 were 4+ years | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 6:38 | comment | added | Rubiksmoose Mod | @gszavae I'm fairly certain one of the queries in this post does show the age of the protected question (or at least how long it has been protected). If not both those seem like they would be something I'd be able to write a query for. | |
| Jul 20, 2020 at 6:31 | comment | added | user-781943 | It would be great if someone could calculate the age of each protected answer, or even better the date of the latest deleted answer one each. Most of them were years old from memory. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 19:33 | comment | added | Oblivious Sage Mod | @Medix2 Nice! It would be ideal if you could limit it to only deleted answers from low-rep users, but since that's apparently not an option this query will suffice. It's interesting to note that on most of the questions with a lot of deleted answers, the majority of the deleted answers come from non-low-rep (>100) users, and were deleted due to violating various policies (back up subjective answers with experience, don't advocate illegal activity or link to sites that engage in it, etc.), rather than anything that would get them auto-protected. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 19:33 | comment | added | Exempt-Medic | @user-63873687 Using that data then (small ±1 errors may have happened): 242/834 (29.0%) have one deleted answer. 277/834 (33.2%) have two deleted answers. 167/834 (20.0%) have three deleted answers. 84/834 (10.1%) have four deleted answers. 35/834 (4.2%) have five deleted answers. 15/834 (1.8%) have six deleted answers. 13/834 (1.6%) have seven or more deleted answers. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 19:22 | comment | added | Exempt-Medic | @ObliviousSage I believe this discussed in this answer to "Counting the number of deleted answers on questions that have been protected" is probably the desired search | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 19:20 | comment | added | Oblivious Sage Mod | @user-63873687 There might be some way to dig that information out of the system with a SEDE query. If by "+5" you mean "5 or more deleted answers per protected question" then that's definitely not the case. The Community user (who represents automated actions by the site itself) automatically protects a question once it has 3 deleted answers from low-rep users, and it treats an answer deleted as spam as 2 such answers. The max possible deleted answers (from low-rep users) a protected question can have is 3 (unless someone goes and unprotects it), and in most cases it will be 1-2. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 18:32 | comment | added | Carcer | @user-63873687 the point there is that we don't have any specific tools we can use to prevent spam questions before they are posted - unlike spam answers, which we can prevent by protecting questions. (SE has higher-level spam prevention mechanisms which catch a lot of spam, both question and answer, before they are posted, but they're not within the scope of our power to manage, and we're only concerning ourselves with the spam that they let through.) | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 17:34 | comment | added | nitsua60 | @ObliviousSage I think the thing that's making me happiest out of this debacle (the mass-unprotection debacle, that is) is to have on meta someone like you laying out there some experience-based thoughts on what should be protected or not. My fond hope for this summer/fall is that the site has a long-overdue conversation--not that I realized its necessity before now--about (un)protection. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 9:40 | comment | added | user-63873687 | There's a lot of talk of repeat spam, could you get stats of how many deleted answers per protected question? I'm guessing most will have +5, but it would be good to see. It would also be great to see how many times each question has been re-protected. | |
| Jul 18, 2020 at 9:35 | comment | added | user-63873687 | "We don't really have any tools to prevent question spam" - sorry to state the obvious but isn't the primary defense mechanism against spam flags? | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 20:24 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 15, 2020 at 20:23 | comment | added | Oblivious Sage Mod | Haha, no, it's fine. When I saw the comment that one user represented almost half of the protections I was like, "Who could that be? Wait, that's not me is it... +clicks SEDE link+ Yup, it's me." Neither you nor Catija put a particularly negative cast on it, beyond a very reasonable, "This very short list of people is responsible for the vast majority of protection, so maybe we should be asking them what criteria they used?" | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 19:56 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 15, 2020 at 19:49 | comment | added | Rubiksmoose Mod | @ObliviousSage To be clear, I hope you don't feel negatively called out in that respect, because it was not at all my intent. I don't think you've done anything wrong (and I've edited my answer to hopefully make that clearer). I'm very thankful you stopped by to talk about your criteria and some of the history there though! | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 19:38 | comment | added | Oblivious Sage Mod | 3) When I first got the privilege to protect I will freely admit I was a little overzealous with it, sometimes preemptively protecting questions that looked like they had the spellcaster spammers' favorite keywords (the [magic] and [spellcaster] tags in particular). However, SSD had a talk with me about that shortly after he got his diamond and I cut back on the protection. I had assumed that at that time he had also gone and unprotected a lot of the ones that didn't really need it, but I don't know for sure. (3/3) | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 19:38 | comment | added | Oblivious Sage Mod | 2) My own criteria for protecting questions (at least the past few years, see final point) is similar to the Community criteria, merely tighter. Where Community looks for 3 deleted answers from low-rep users, with spam counting double, my own threshold is essentially 2 deleted answers from low-rep users, with spam counting double (that is, I immediately protect a question once it gets a spam answer; before I got the protect privilege I saw the spellcaster spammers hit several questions repeatedly). It's possible that Community would have ended up protecting many of them anyway. (2/3) | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 19:38 | comment | added | Oblivious Sage Mod | Having been called out as the person responsible for almost half of all protections, I guess I might as well take a moment to explain myself (I won't apologize, as I don't feel I've done anything to justify it). My high numbers in this area are probably a combination of a couple different factors. 1) I'm highly active on the site in terms of non-mod moderation activity, to the point of having the most reviews in all but 1 or 2 of the review queues. A lot of these other questions might well have been protected by the mods or other users anyway, I just happened to get to them first. (1/3) | |
| Jul 13, 2020 at 22:21 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 21:03 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 20:14 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 20:02 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 19:14 | answer | added | RubiksmooseMod | timeline score: 8 | |
| Jul 13, 2020 at 18:34 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 18:29 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 18:12 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 18:11 | history | edited | Someone_EvilMod |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 18:11 | history | edited | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 13, 2020 at 17:54 | history | asked | RubiksmooseMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |