Hellweek is now over.
Hellweek lasted from Monday, December 21 to Monday, December 28. Dozens of bans were issued.
You can also continue to discuss what you thought of it in this thread.
Things we plan on improving in the future, if we do this again:
- Making it clear which boards will receive increased moderation, as there was some ambiguity and miscommunication regarding /b/.
- Responding to reports more quickly. (Though all of them should have been responded to within at most 24 hours.)
- Possibly providing some kind of public ban board so people can get an idea of what's being moderated.
Reports were very helpful to us. I also created a new mod panel that allowed us to quickly review and dismiss every single post made during hellweek, though this did get a bit backlogged.
The original announcement can be found below.
As discussed in Wednesday's townhall:
From Monday, December 21 to Monday, December 28, lolcow staff will begin an experimental "heavy moderation week". The purpose of this will be to gauge community reaction to moderation actions, and help determine if permanent policy changes should be made. The secondary purpose will be to hopefully encourage people to improve their quality of posts in the long term, without moderators having to step in.
Only posts made during this week will receive extra scrutiny. Posts made before or after hellweek are not eligible to be moderated more harshly than usual.
Since this is just an experiment, all bans issued during hellweek for rules that are not currently listed at https://lolcow.farm/rules will last no longer than 4 days. Most will likely be a lot shorter than 4 days, but that is the maximum.
Heavy moderation will primarily be enforced in /pt/, /snow/, and /g/. /b/ is mostly not receiving any additional scrutiny.
Moderation will be extremely subjective, and in some cases, may even appear arbitrary. I can't really provide a list of specific things we will be targeting, but here are some general ideas for what will likely be focused on:
- Immaturity
- Vendettas
- Giving clear signs that you are new to the Internet, imageboards, or lolcow.farm
- Blatantly injecting your own agenda into a discussion, especially when apropos of nothing
- Self-focused or very off-topic derailing
- Talking about yourself excessively
- Use or overuse of specific words, phrases, or emotes
- Unwarranted/emotional overreactions
Of course, this is pretty vague and not helpful, but that's pretty much the best I can do. You all will probably get the idea within the first few days.
Importantly, rules will change a little around samefagging during hellweek. Samefagging may be called out in specific instances. If you suspect it, feel free to report it.
But rules around identity will still exist as they currently are. If you aren't breaking a global rule, staff will never publicly out you or identify you in any way. If you're samefagging in a thread about someone you know, you may be banned and/or called out for samefagging or having a vendetta, but nothing about your identity will be revealed. So, vendettas won't be called out in cases where they would blatantly identify the person with the vendetta; that would be a non-public ban instead. It is impossible to call out many kinds of self-posts without outing someone's identity (like a cow complimenting themselves in their own /pt/ thread, for example), so those cases will always be handled privately, without public outing or ban messages. General self-posting will still be called out if it wouldn't reveal details about someone's identity.
People are encouraged to report many more posts than usual during hellweek. However, too many frivolous reports may result in yourself being banned and/or your report being called out, in extreme cases. I'd say for most people, it's fine to report as much as you want without fear of being banned: just don't report someone for arguing with you or insulting you, or something like that. Basically, just don't do this: https://lolcow.farm/pt/res/187661.html#196112
If you have any questions, you can post them in this thread. I may not answer all questions.