Question

Possible alternative to suspensions.

Answer 1

did you just get suspended?

Answer 2

It seems to me that a good punishment for certain users would be to temporarily disallow them from giving or receiving medals. I think this would be particularly effective for users who are repeat answer seekers or answer givers. The punishment fits the crime and discourages the behavior it is punishing.

Answer 3

No. I didn't.

Answer 4

This is an interesting idea. I'd dearly love to suspend medal receiving privileges for people who repeatedly post just answers or who plagiarise good answers from other sources. But I can't really see what circumstances it would be helpful to suspend medal giving privileges under.

Answer 5

If someone consistently asks for and rewards pure answers, ignoring good explanation and refusing to participate in learning, I think it makes sense to limit their ability to give medals for a while, especially if it's a visible thing and people can know that a person is suspended from giving medals.
I don't know how that would play out practically. It might be too harsh of a punishment, but compared to suspending, it seems tame. And I don't really think that people get suspended for it at the moment, and they probably shouldn't. There needs to be some kind of recourse for this kind of user, and it should be one that somehow encourages them to be better learners. I don't know how well this would work.

Answer 6

In my mind, here's how I see it working. Someone is suspended from giving medals, and suddenly those people who are only interested in giving quick answers to receive medals have no reason to answer them. People like me who are interested in giving explanations and hardly care about medals still respond, and so the person is forced to work with the good teachers, rather than receive answers from the answer givers.

Answer 7

Those are good points but it would work only if answerers could see who can and cannot give medals at the moment. Discipline should not involve sticking scarlet As on people and pushing them out into the community with a big, "I'm being punished" badge on them. And it would take away medal-giving suspended users ability to reward proper answers which is unfair to the people giving good answers.

Medal getting privileges, though - I really like that idea. It is more appropriate in terms of punishment fitting crime, less draconian and probably more efficient than multiple warnings and then a suspension at the end.

Answer 8

I suppose I agree with that, pretty much.

Answer 9

We already have some much worse alternatives to suspensions in the works. :)

Answer 10

^it's always scary when the word worse and the smiley face are in one sentence

Answer 11

Much worse? My feeling is that there needs to be a milder alternative.

Answer 12

I would disagree. The biggest motivation that people have for using the site is getting their questions answered. A suspension seems like the most reasonable way to prevent that if they repeatedly break the CoC. Just my 2 cents though.

Answer 13

my 5 cents would be on pitbull

Answer 14

Two problems with the suspension. It's harsh enough that mods understandably shy away from it until there's some EGREGIOUS offense. An offense as simple as giving pure answers without explanation... just feels ridiculous to suspend for. It's stupid to suspend for it, but it's just as stupid not to punish it at all.
Secondly, realistically speaking, banned users just make an alt account.

Answer 15

Well, the "solution" that I propose would resolve the alternate account issue. In addition, you're going to start seeing increased email verification methods on the site as well. I'm personally pulling for using that as an additional troll deterrent by limiting your activity until you verify your email - but not everyone feels as I do about that. So, we'll see what it looks like when that feature rolls out.

While I'm not sure I agree with you on suspending being "ridiculous" for those issues, if you have a viable alternative we'll listen to it. I definitely don't see revoking medal giving privileges working, though.

Answer 16

what about *ghost* status? i think you're argument with medal suspension is that you dont want to publicly humiliate a person...well ghost status lets a person *receive* a medal...but it wont work (i mean it wont do anything to the score) of course...the user should be notified that he wont receive score from the medal prior...the only problem is best answer -__- well what do you think of the concept anyway @farmdawgnation

Answer 17

Well, your choices at this point in time are:
1) Exactly what you're doing now. Continue to crack down on language/content offenses, but decide to do literally nothing about those more minor offenses.
2) Decide you're going to give suspensions out for minor answering offenses.
3) Come up with some more fitting punishment for minor answering offenses.

Answer 18

I think your worst option is 2. Suspending users for answering/asking offenses is just not practical. It's overly harsh and will probably just drive users away from the site.

1 isn't as bad, but it's still pretty terrible. By doing nothing about answer-givers, you promote their behavior and even reward it. Obviously it's more time-efficient to earn medals simply by giving answers than by giving explanations. If the structure of the site is such that there's no built-in reason to give explanations rather than answers, well then, I think it's obvious that the site inherently supports answer-givers.

Option 3 isn't easy to accomplish, but it's necessary because of how horrible options 1 and 2 are. Fine, bash my proposed alternative. Come up with a better one though.

Answer 19

Sorry, but we do, in fact, act against "minor answering offenses" as you would say. We really don't consider them that minor. Heh. The suspensions don't happen as quickly or elevate as rapidly as more annoying offenses (i.e. spam), but they do occur.

In regard to the argument about driving people away from the site - we are, more or less, taking a stand about the type of community we want to create. I think that does involve some users not being happy with what they find here, and that's fine. If they want to get or give quick one-off answers, they need to go elsewhere. This isn't really the place for them, and that's OK.

And I didn't mean to "bash" your answer. Merely stating that I don't think it's a feasible alternative. If I we had an alternative that we liked better, we would have certainly implemented it already. Haha.

Answer 20

Uhh... I just know from an observer perspective, which both kinds of users we are talking about, quick answerers and pure-answer seekers, I see a good number of users doing this long-term. This tells me that you have found no effective way to stop it.

Answer 21

with*

Answer 22

Well, you've got to keep in mind that in the history of OpenStudy, the initiative against "just answers" is a relatively recent development. We previously took a much softer approach to the issue that didn't involve active moderation.

That said, no method we implement, be it a softened suspension or our current practices, will be 100% effective. The moderators *can't* see everything that happens on-site. The staff (like myself) definitely can't. We depend on abuse reports, running across things in our daily use of the site, and the support of the community. There isn't really a way to automate against giving "just-answers" without some serious piece of natural language processing algorithms, so we do what we can with what we've got.

Answer 23

i still vote for the pop up reminders of the CoC :DDD hehehe

Answer 24

@lgbasallote I think @darthsid might slap you with a trout for suggesting more modal popups. :P

Answer 25

Right, yeah. I understand all of that, and I'm not suggesting trying to automate it. I'm just suggesting trying to equip your moderators better. Right now they are armed with a shotgun, and unless they want to blow a user to bits, they do nothing.

Answer 26

forgive my hyperbole.

Answer 27

i think it was a hyperbolic metaphor..forgive my math

Answer 28

Yes. Both Hyperbole and metaphor.

Answer 29

That's not exactly true. Our moderators have a lot of tools at their disposal. Suspensions are just the ones that cause the biggest bru-ha-ha when someone decides to come back with an alternate account.

Mods have the ability to interact with the user in the question and DM the user to try and start a conversation about it. If they don't respond to that, they additionally have the ability to Kick the user from the group and/or issue them Official Warnings, which trigger a series of emails to the user and all the other moderators, and force you to acknowledge reading the warning before you can continue using the site. If we feel it is necessary, we can delete the relevant questions and replies, which will revoke SmartScore points from the user. If these don't work, we move on to suspensions.

Answer 30

And if you feel those are all the tools you need, then fantastic.

Answer 31

btw..dont you think warnings should be saved in emails? id love to browse through my trophy warnings in my free time

Answer 32

I agree. I'd like to be able to print my warnings off and dive into them like Scrooge McDuck.

Answer 33

LOL.