Question

Moderator issue:

The other night on the mathematics site we had a spammer who wouldn't stop despite several requests. This is an ideal situation where it would have made sense for the moderator to kick them out of group.

Unfortunately, there was only one moderator shown as logged on. However they weren't actually there and hence they couldn't act and no one else could act.

It would seem to make sense therefore that the moderator (and maybe everyone) be logged out automatically after some period of inactivity, say 30 minutes.

Answer 1

kicking functions is removed so it wouldn't help, but you could delete posts and as I'm aware there was update which should have automatically drop off people, but according to that "only one moderator" he wasn't online and his pc was turned off. So probably that update wasn't so successful

Answer 2

Ok. I wasn't aware 'kicking' was turned off. But of course the point still stands. Someone needed to do something and no one could.

Answer 3

Did you file an abuse report on the issue? That's the best way to take action against someone for the time being.

On the note of the kick functionality, we're constantly re-evaluating it. The guts of the code is still there, but we just took away the button for now. I personally want to add a Rick Roll button for the moderators to use because I think that would be more useful, but that's just me. :D

With regard to the online/offline issue, could you guys please holler at us next time you guys see that happen? We have code in place to time out people's sessions, but we've seen issues where users who have multiple tabs open on the site can cause issues. We've had trouble duplicating this issue on our development environment.

Answer 4

I did lodge a couple of abuse reports, yes.

Answer 5

I don't see any from you going back to 12/14... was it before that?

Answer 6

Just noticed:
you may ask Preetha if she was online this time because I came like 3-4hours ago and she still on but haven't noticed any activity, she didn't reply to my reply and it's also night in Canada

Answer 7

@farm: I'm almost certain it's in that time window; I remember submitting the same wording on two postings in Mathematics.

Answer 8

I don't want to encourage this too much, but if it's super-disruptive, try to get others to report abuse on the user. It should make the urgency of the problem clearer. Though obviously if the moderators are all asleep, that's a problem heh.

It's definitely a solid idea to give the moderators a certain timeout after which moderation privileges are passed on to someone who is active. We'll look into that for sure.

Answer 9

Thanks. (And I'm sorry my reports seem to have gone awol; I have no idea how that happened!)