/meta/ - site discussion

Rescheduled: The Townhall has been rescheduled for Tuesday 6/6/17 at 7 PM EST.

Topics will include the following:

>integrating newfags
>male posters
>/sty/
>nitpicking
>new features
>new staff and their responsibilities


Please come and voice any comments and/or suggestions. A link will be posted an hour before we start.

Someone asked about posting statistics.

Here's a line graph of all posts per week for /pt/ up until today. As you can see, post rate has been increasingly pretty steadily.

The post below is the same graph for /b/.

The survey is up, click here to take it

---

To celebrate a year full of rich, creamy milk ending, we'll host the lolcow awards 2016!

You can now submit your nominations.

Categories
> best milk
> favorite cow
> worst cow
> Horrorcow
> best troll
> worst troll
> best comeback
> biggest plot twist
> best user submitted content (photo edits etc.)

Once we have a good amount of categories, the thread will be updated, and you will be able to post your nominations for each category. After that, a poll will be posted for everyone to vote.

Enjoy!

I've set up a chat page. The code is derived from CyTube (http://cytu.be) with minor modifications. You can talk about whatever you want and share videos.

You do not have to register an account to chat. Registration is optional. You only need to register if you want to make a channel or want to reserve a certain name.

The official chat channel is http://chat.lolcow.farm/r/meta.

Users can create their own channels by registering an account and clicking Account -> Channels. The owner of a channel becomes a moderator of it, and can ban or mute people from it. Channel owners are free to enforce their own rules as long as none of them conflict with lolcow global rules. However, in cases of extreme power hunger, drama, or overzealous moderation, I reserve the right to take control of a channel and appoint a new owner.

I will likely embed a channel (with video removed) into some part of the chan in the near future, to function as an inline chat box.



Please discuss chat issues and suggestions in this thread. I threw the color scheme together pretty quickly and don't like it that much, so I would appreciate style suggestions. If you want, you can adjust the CSS values yourself with Chrome developer tools (F12 on Windows, Cmd + Alt + I on OS X) and tell me the exact changes you'd like to see.

Please also suggest new emotes. Emotes can be based on images of any size, but they're downscaled to 120x120 in the emote list page and 85x85 in the chat, so crop images as much as you can and make sure they look good at 85x85. Ideally they should be 120x120 or larger.

---

Usage

New channels are private by default. Go to Channel Settings -> Admin Settings to set a password or to make it public.

To use an emote, click Emote List and press one of the buttons, or type the emote name surrounded by colons. :cow: is one example.

Message styling is the same as the ones valid for lolcow.farm (see >>2). So **bold** (bold) and #<3 (♥) work. The ones in the CyTube guide here work as well, but _ and * are italics and ** is bold: https://github.com/calzoneman/sync/wiki/CyTube-3.0-User-Guide#default-formatting

Full documentation can be found at https://github.com/calzoneman/sync/wiki/CyTube-3.0-User-Guide.

Survey for all Farmers

The farmhands have crafted a survey for all site users to take, in order to improve moderation. Be as honest as you'd like; negative feedback is what will lead to the most positive changes. Discussion can always be had here in meta, but this is an opportunity to voice concerns off-site where no one needs have any concerns about confidentiality.

Hokay…
So, time for another announcement.

This may be long so I'll make a list of the points I will be addressing and you can decide what concerns you.
-Banned cows still being a concern
-New Farmhands and the application
-"Sperg-chan" (our resident Taylor-obsessed spammer) and other invaders, like from /r9k/ etc
-Dramu with old admin (or lack thereof??)
-What you as Farmers can do about the current problems
-Brief summary of some changes being made

>Banned cows
Not the 8chan board, though they are also part of the reason for this announcement being made in the first place.
I know that there was a lot of backlash when former admin took down some of the threads and I am 100% behind that decision. However, I also think there's a way we can effectively give everyone a place to post about them without allowing them on main boards. This would be done by creating a few new boards where the banned cows can be discussed, along with a separate set of staff members that would be able to police these offshoots of the community. (Example; a board such as /sh/ for Shuddercows could include all the ana posts that aren't allowed currently. Someone from that part of the community could run the board and appoint staff members appropriately, as long as the main rules of the site are respected)

>Our new staff members
I have appointed a few new staff members since the admin change. One of the janitors from the previous administration was made a mod right from the start and I brought in someone I trust from off-site as a mod to deal with reports from the get go, and some janitors were appointed via the application I created. Some of the new Farmhands started as janitors and were later promoted to mod.
I have a few more applications to read over, and potentially recruit more members. If you plan to apply and would like to come onboard to specifically moderate a certain board, feel free to mention that in your application. The Farmhand application can be found in this thread >>2823
Right now we have a lot of moderation being done by people following the basic schedule of daylight hours in the US. We need more people who are available during the daytime in the UK and EU (which corresponds to night hours in the US)

>Spammers and other evil forces at work
It's pretty clear by now that our site has been invaded recently. Part of this is due to the URL being posted elsewhere. And the reason for the URL being shared, partly was due in part I suspect to Spoony's being banned. I very much would find it believable that she's behind a lot of the /banned cow/ threads on 8chan. In the past she was responsible for the initial /r9k/ incursion. Now we have some other anons who are annoyed by the admin change and have been further making lolcow's presence known to the rest of the Internut.
There aren't a lot of options for combatting this, since robots are plentiful and have too much time on their hands. So we have been issuing bans and deletions. It's not hard to proxy, though, and we are dealing with a plethora of IPs which leaves little to be utilised by our home team.
A few other possibilities are adding a captcha, which has only the >potential< to be effective; a prolonged hellweek; and overall encouragement for more users to make reports

Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

The time is nigh.

Hellweek is upon us, Farmers. Prepare yourselves:

-stupid personal blog posts will result in a ban
-overtly samefagging will also result in a ban
-generally poor quality or baiting posts will result in a ban

Moderators have the discretion to temporarily ban anyone that is going off-topic, if they see fit.

I have promoted new moderators and brought in new janitors so let the fires blaze, and let the milk forever flow!!

Indefinite hellweek is now in effect. I do not know when or if it may end. It applies to every board.

You can use this thread for discussion, but I likely won't reply to most posts. To appeal a ban, use the actual appeal form.

Note: If you're banned, don't assume I was the one who necessarily banned you. We have several mods. If the ban isn't reversed, though, you can consider it a ban I approve of.

This thread is locked and will be used solely by me to document significant rule changes. Each post will include the date the rule was added/deleted/changed, and the change that was made.

You can make your own dedicated threads to discuss specific rule changes if you like, but otherwise, you can discuss all of them here: >>1023

The rules are at https://lolcow.farm/rules

Here are some rule changes and clarifications of existing rules.

First, since there is no objective definition of what "self-posting" or "samefagging" actually mean, I'm going to define some terms.

The actual rule changes will be in the post below this one.

---

Sockpuppetry - General term for any deceptive anonymous posts made by an individual, where the poster tries to give the impression that they weren't the one who made the post.

---

Anonymous attentionwhoring / attentionfagging - One form of sockpuppetry. Posting about yourself anonymously, while trying to hide the fact that it's you who's posting, to attract attention to yourself. Generally the person will pretend to either be a fan or a "hater". This may include complimenting yourself, insulting yourself, linking to or uploading your own photos or social media posts, or just mentioning yourself at all. Examples include Princess Doll (>>>/cream/64) and Eboni (>>>/cream/12).

---

Samefagging - Another form of sockpuppetry. A few things can be called samefagging, but in this case I'll just refer to it as when a poster tries to reinforce their own position in a thread by giving the appearance of multiple people who agree with them or who disagree with and/or dislike the opposition. Often occurs during arguments and disagreements.

---

Blogposting - Sharing personal anecdotes, details, stories, or experiences in a thread intended to discuss a specific topic. This includes posting about your physical attributes, physical or mental health, family, childhood, job, relationships… Sometimes referred to as "self-posting", but I will call it blogposting to reduce ambiguity.

---

Branded - A poster who has violated a global rule and had some, or all, of their posts labelled with their name or username. Please re-read the rules to understand what violations may merit this. This is only done in very rare and extreme cases. >>>/cream/ should have pretty much every instance of branding.