Why do you continue to post responses to spam questions after repeated requests by the mods to not do this?

Disclaimer: I rarely do this myself, but personally find the banter enjoyable.

Because it’s fun. And because the mods’ (or is it mod’s?) request for people not to do this makes no sense. They have never been able to present a sensible reason for people to abstain.

“More work for the mods” seems a clear reason.

@gailcalled It only makes more work for them if they want it to. They do not need to remove the silly responses, only the spammy question. We’ve talked this to death many times already.

I have no idea of the technical ins and outs of modding, but if they continue to make the same request, why not comply?

Every flag creates another email for them to deal with.
Why do you assume it doesn’t make more work for them when they say it does? I can’t imagine why they would lie about that.

@dappled_leaves We often remove every response because they provide ways to find the spam again in searches. People often find “back doors” to questions that have been removed. It may seem overkill, but we try to do everything we can to keep Fluther from being associated with the spam. That is why it makes more work. Do we have to do it? Probably not. But we do it so that we are doing everything we can to help Fluther when it comes to searches, ratings, listings, and more.

When this question came up in the past, a jelly said that it was similar to accepting a rent-free invitation to someone’s lovely beach house and then refusing to comply with the rule of leaving your shoes at the door (but in sharper langauge).

It seems akin to deliberately dropping messy food on the floor because “someone will clean it up”.

I had no idea about this rule, but I’ve also been gone for the majority of 2014.

I don’t remember the last time I even noted a spam question, much less opened it.

Kudos to the moderation team!

I was feeling silly this morning.
Sorry

OK, but if it also creates more work for the mods every time someone flags it, why not allow one post saying, “flagged” and leave it at that? That way, everyone who looks at it knows it’s been flagged, and the mods don’t have even more work?

^ “If it also creates more work for the mods every time someone flags it…”

It doesn’t. The flags get bunched together, somehow.

@Seaofclouds “We often remove every response because they provide ways to find the spam again in searches. ”

Deleted questions are not searchable. Please, prove me wrong if you can.

I know but sometimes the devil makes me do it…..

@dappled_leaves: You mean like this one?

Or, perhaps, this one?

Easily searchable by key words. The first one I searched with “fluther chauvinism month”, because I remembered it. The second one was random, I just searched “Mumbai call girl”.

Does this prove to your satisfaction that deleted questions are searchable?

@canidmajor Aha. That’s very interesting – the last time I tried this, I couldn’t get it to work at all, but perhaps that is because Fluther Search has not been very functional in the past.

All right, then. If a Google search will not turn up deleted questions, why not simply make deleted questions unsearchable on Fluther as well? Surely, that is a simple, one-shot solution that does not require the herding of jellies cats?

I used to do that a lot too. Yeah that was fun. Sometimes I had a good laugh with others from it too. Now I almost never do that, since the mods want so.

There is one question: why don’t the mods delete the spam question completely? It may be unseachable on Fluther, but how about using lurves and browsers’ history? I have seen some questions here being “eaten” by the big fat king-of-the-sea (sorry I forgot his name) so maybe deleting isn’t impossible.

@Mimishu1995 That’s another good idea. Again, easier than convincing every jelly to toe the line.

I hate that I can’t flag on mobile. I know no development is being done but still annoying.

@hug_of_war Can you switch to destop mode on your mobile? Whenever I flag on my mobile I switch to destop mode. It is a bit time-consuming but it works.

Because most of us are ‘Murcans dammit and we don’t kowtow to no authority figures making up laws just to make themselves feel high an mighty.

@Mimishu1995 Yeah but I’m lazy, especially at midnight-1am when I often see spam crop up. Laziness always wins. I’m not proud, but those are the facts,

Some things are worth fighting for, but arguing for being allowed to respond on spam questions? Really? And needing a satisfactory reason why you shouldn’t post on spam?

Is if really that important?

is a ‘delete from where’ sql query that hard?

Holy Cow, @jonsblond is absolutely right. To have a hissy fit about this of all things is beyond idiotic. Someone who volunteers a fair amount of time to trying to keep the site cleaned up and pleasurable to use says “please don’t do this thing that is pointless and causes us some annoyance and effort”, and you decide not only that you must do this thing, but you demand to be told why you shouldn’t indulge in every childish whim?

If you have enough time and energy to let this become an issue, you really need to expand your parameters for living.
Read a book. Take a walk. Phone a friend. Organize your sock drawer. Watch a movie.

It is hard when it wastes minutes that could be used doing a thousnd other things that are actually fun like eating pizza and drinking beer.

REMEMBER: The mods here are not paid, they do not have shifts. You are wasting time that they could be using to snuggle their children (or cats).

I used to fuck with spammers until I was told that it hurts the mods. Now I don’t. It isn’t hard.

Occasionally I post nonsensical or intentionally stupid questions for this very reason. Jellies just want to have fun. There are acceptable avenues of non-productivity. :)

@canidmajor No one is having a hissy fit. We were asked a question, and we are answering it. Calmly.

Seems a bit of a hissy-fit to me to assert, again and again, that it makes no difference to the mods and that haven’t explained this to your satisfaction (see your first three posts), and keep arguing that they are what? Lying? Less informed than you about how the site works?

“Calmly” isn’t the issue, here. Content is. I can’t imagine why this matters to you.

@canidmajor Again, @wildpotato asked a question, and I’ve been explaining my take on it. If anyone doesn’t care to hear the answers, then they should either not ask the question, or they should stop following. This is not rocket science. And I will reiterate, since you are being insistent: I am not throwing a hissy fit or any other kind of fit. I am just calmly typing responses. I will also remind you that I have already stated (in my first response, no less) that I seldom do this thing myself. I’m just trying to explain why people do, from my perspective. That is what Fluther is about. Answering questions from different perspectives.

Here is what I do find annoying: If the mods have a problem that needs solving, then it seems obvious to me that they should seek a global solution to that problem. As @ragingloli said, it’s not that difficult to find a technical fix to this issue. What is very, very difficult is to control the behaviour of every single jelly on this site. Actually, that is not just difficult – it is impossible. So, it sounds to me as if complaints on this topic are not aimed at finding real solutions at all. They are just rounds of knuckle-rapping; a way of shaming jellies for “misbehaving”, whatever that is according to the mod zeitgeist of the moment. As a community, we don’t deserve that.

I did that all the time until I was told it created more work, and so I stopped. Don’t look at me.

@dappled_leaves In a sense I get what you’re saying, but at the same time, I really don’t follow at all. There are a ton of other rules on this site that people follow without question, while this isn’t a strict rule like the others, it is us mods asking the community to be kind and not create extra work for us for the sake of a cheap laugh that won’t even be there anymore once we see it. I just don’t see the point.

Sorry, I hadn’t realized. Won’t be doing it again!

@El_Cadejo This ^ is the point. A lot of people don’t know it’s considered “wrong”. It’s not a rule; it’s not in the guidelines; it doesn’t even make common sense. So no, you’re not going to be able to get everyone to do it.

But again – why even attack the problem from the cat-herding angle? This is what makes no sense to me.

And, I’ll come out and say it – I’ve had mods privately tell me it that removing the comments isn’t at all necessary. So, make of that what you will.

@dappled_leaves I haven’t seen a mod complain about this at all in this thread. I provided an answer and @El_Cadejo added a bit to it. As for finding a technical fix, if you know a developer willing to work for free and explain to us (the mod team) how to add it, test it, and fix it if it breaks, let us know. I personally don’t know anything about computer programming. We have one mod that has done some techy stuff for the site. We have limited resources when it comes to the technical stuff, so in order to work with what we have been given, this is what we do.

As I said before, we probably don’t have to do it, but it is something we try to do for the better of Fluther. As @canidmajor showed you, questions do come up on searches. There have been discussions on Fluther before about how Google rates us and how different things hurt us in their rating. So, even behind just what shows up in the searches, we want to do everything we can to help in those situations.

We completely understand that there may be people that don’t know we have requested this, that is why when we see a user doing it a lot, we asked them (privately) not to do it anymore and explain why. As for making it an official rule in the guidelines, that wouldn’t make everyone suddenly know about it either as most people don’t read the guidelines until they are told to or until they want to look to see if something is really there when told they are breaking the guidelines. We have never accused anyone of breaking the guidelines for posting on spam questions, we have only asked them to stop doing it.

I honestly don’t understand why this is a big issue. People are going to do it, we know that. But, if more people make an active decision not to do it because they know we have asked them not to, it will reduce the workload. We know we will never eliminate it all, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to cut it back.

Technical answer here. Before they used to just nuke a question and the URL would shoot out a 404. Then people bitched that their questions were getting totally removed. So the answer was just to hide them but still be visible if you knew the URL.

Soooo… You wanted a feature and the mods complied and the end result is google still sees the deleted questions and you need to stop posting in spam threads since google still seems them and it drives down the quality index for the site.

There is no real debate here. There is a reason this rule is in place.

I will post “flagged” with the time on it. Why? Because if I come to a spam question and someone has already flagged it, and they typed “flagged” then I won’t bother. When I come on this site at 6 or 7 a.m. and find a bunch of spam, if I see someone’s flagged already, then great, I don’t have to. If I don’t see that the q has been flagged, then I will flag. When someone notifies me that they’ve flagged, they’re doing a service to me and others by notifying us that we don’t have to bother to flag.

It seems like a lot of spam goes up in the early morning (like right before I log on or right around that time). Maybe because it comes from India or other similar places, when it’s evening to my morning. There’s not much other activity on Fluther in the early morning hours.

I feel like when people flag, they’re doing a service to the site. When people post “flagged” they’re doing a service to others by notifying them not to bother flagging.

This is not a hissy fit. This is an answer.

I appreciate that you do that, @jca, so I then don’t flag it.
By “hissy fit”, I meant the discussion about how the mods say that it’s more work to be removing the witty quips and people here saying they’re lying, and that it makes no difference and prove this and that and the other. Definitely not posting as you do which prevents more flags and emails and extra work.

@jca I can’t speak for the other mods, but from my POV I’ve never seen that as an issue. I don’t mind removing one extra post and you’re also saving other users time as they don’t need to bother flagging it. On our end, it makes no difference if 1 person flags or 50, it all just gets put into one email conversation by gmail, but like I said, you’re saving others time so I see that as a good thing.

First question I’ve unfollowed in weeks.

@jca There is a similar question to this a few months ago. I still remember that one mod said that commenting that you have flagged the question is still “unhelpful”. That’s the reason why you don’t “see” me flag. Whenever I see you flag anything and say “flagged”, I really want to say to you: “Save your energy, I have already done it for you”, but you know, the mods won’t be pleased I think

I’ve done it too but wasn’t aware it was a no no. Oh well….I shall refrain in the future, although I have not replied on any regular basis only a few times that just begged for humorous responses.

@jca More recently, like today, I’ve seen you post answers to these that do not contain the helpful content (“Flagged at X time”) you referenced above as your reason for adding more work for the mods and driving down the quality index of our site. So I’m curious about whether you’d like to expand on your above answer.