Some of my griping today has garnered me enough empathy from others with similar stores to come make a post here. This morning, I noticed some newer members of my region had decided to start together a somewhat amateur roleplay on our RMB, something we consider spam, and managed to get about 100 posts in between the three or four of them before any of us noticed. After letting them know about our policy, I went to suppress this spam. After about 20-odd posts done, the cooldown began, of course, to slowly rise. First a few seconds, then a minute, and I got as far as somewhere between 8 and 10 minutes per single post suppressed before I gave up entirely for about 45 minutes...and returned to a rate of still about 5 or 6 mins of cooldown per suppression. I've still got a bit short of 50 posts to go, after getting one at a time on and off all day.
This is frankly, kind of terrible. While bitching about it, half a dozen other regional admins immediately spoke up with similar stories. A small group of people spam up a large volume of posts before anyone notices and can warn/kick/ban them. If it's actually rulebreaking, a mod will mod-suppress it all for you....eventually, and there's not much you can do right away except wait for the GHR to be answered (not even hop in the Mibbit anymore, either). In many cases, the content is not site-rule-breaking, just regional-rule-breaking, so that's not going to happen at all. Simply put, the cooldowns in place are severely restricting the ability of regional leadership to use the suppression tool as intended - to self-moderate their communities to their own standards.
I'd like to examine, as part of this, why the suppression limit exists, and other content from its addition to the game. Most of these quotes will be from this thread
Elu noted a throttle was implemented. When asked why, Sedge says -
Sedgistan wrote:The continued use of illegal scripts + mass suppression isn't a desirable behaviour, so we don't want to make it easy.
To simplify - Illegal suppression scripts and mass suppression during raids are not wanted. Understandable points (though raiders can and do still mass suppress even with this when they really want to).
Elu adds -
Eluvatar wrote:Suppression was intended to be used on specific posts that leaders have a problem with. Suppressing thousands of posts simply because you can, creating a more difficult task for people who are generally less prepared for it is not something we want to encourage.
To simplify - Mass suppression is not wanted. Understandable point.
(I'd counter that, in normally political situations, the "My region's WA Delegate is an evil dictator who abuses her power!" "Delegates are free to use and abuse their power as they see fit." policy should apply, but that's another fight).
Elu explains -
Eluvatar wrote:The limit is dynamic, and I am disinclined to reveal exactly how it works to avoid giving people ideas of how to try to maximize how quickly they can suppress as many posts as possible. It is intended to be no problem at all when suppressing a few posts, mildly frustrating when suppressing a moderate number of posts, but extremely frustrating when suppressing thousands of posts.
Out what I'd call an overabundance of caution, the public doesn't even get to know what the rate limit is (gameplayers will figure out how to maximize it via trial and error if they really want to, and if it's built well, its existence should be enough to begin with). It's stated to have a design purpose of allowing moderate suppression while not being too frustrating, and to only be a pain for "thousands." Personally, I'd consider a hundred posts, made in the course of a few hours, taking at this rate probably a day and a half to suppress, to be definitely "extremely frustrating" for a "moderate" amount of posts, well short of "thousands."
I'm not usually one to make threads like this without offering a solution.
Examining the above posts regarding the intent of the change, we an draw one main purpose, really - limit the ability to mass-suppress very large volumes of posts (notably as a gameplay element, and especially by use illegal scripts). The problem the community is returning is that what is considered a "very large volume" has been set so low that is restricts normal moderation of more active regions. Anecdotally, I've never hit problems with this cooldown in raids, but I have very frustrating issues with it on a semi-regular basis when moderating my home region, The Black Hawks. My ability to give precise feedback is limited by non-disclosure of how the cooldown periods work. With this in mind, please consider -
>More posts with no cooldown at all, before cooldowns begin to come into effect. It starts getting slow before even one full page is done, somewhere around 15-20 posts this morning. Can we make that like, 40 or 50? At least?
>Rework the math by which cooldowns grow. Consider some plateaus early on. After that initial chunk is used up, kick in 25 at 1s, 25 more at 2s, so forth.
>Don't let the cooldowns get crazy, like more than a few seconds tops, until you're like a hundred or two suppressions for the region in a row down. Then crank the rate up to higher values very fast after that.
These still prevents mass suppressions of all of history, but allows leaders to take care of at least a few pages of spam before it gets into the "minutes per suppression" range. The stated goal is to make suppression of "thousands" of posts hair-pullingly hard, not "hundreds," and certainly not just the "dozens" it is at present.
If you absolutely insist on this being a behavior you want to discourage in Gameplay, stick either the ability to suppress outright or just the ability to suppress at a faster limit than currently on a day timer like mass regional tg's and such. That means tags won't mass suppress (not that that's policy for any org currently existing anyways), while only minorly impacting normal operations. Main outlier to this would be that regions who've been having issues with spammers might have issues if they can't appoint a new RO to help with that right away (with the "outright" option). Maybe you can work some other exception along these lines, perhaps using the "native" (nation has more influence here than anywhere else) marker or something.
TL;DR, suppression rate limits are a major pain in the ass for normal regional self-moderation, please tweak them to allow more suppression before it gets to the "I want to shoot myself" point of 8-10 minutes per single post suppressed.
I'll ask others to chime in in support.
