Sanity's Journal: Censored by Slashdot for criticising Apple!

This is so rediculous I can scarcely believe it. A few days ago /. posted a story about iTunes which seemed a little sycophantic for my tastes, so I posted a comment pointing out (but not even endorsing) some opposing opinions. My comment was rapidly moderated up to +5, and then down it went again as some moderators decided that it was their job to shield innocent eyes from any criticism of Apple. How nice of them.

Meahwhile another user, "hanssprudel", posted a much smarter and wittier comment highlightling the hypocrisy of the Slashdot groupthink who claim to hate DRM, except when it happens to be Apple's DRM. Quite correctly it was moderated up to +4 before, like mine, the fanboys spotted this crime against their beloved Apple and down it went.

All was not lost, it turns out that some moderators actually read the moderator guidelines and decided to try to counteract the handiwork of their fellow moderators. Up and down the comments went, until then - something really surprising happened - I tried to post again and got the following message:

Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email [e-mail] with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "09b3980f7f6a2eef8e166300c0c88a54" and "7bc76bb089f2d469d9d92e2d28d45ba5" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP number "81.178.66.53" and your username "Sanity"

Well that's just great, I have been banned for excessive negative moderation, which wouldn't actually have been possible had it not been for all the positive moderation! Really clever precaution they have there. What is even better is that hanssprudel met the exact same fate (it turned out that I knew him IRL), presumably for the exact same reason!

He and I both emailed the slashdot editors, confident that they would quickly see the flaw in this silly system, unblock us, and apologise for the inconvenience. Not so, instead hans was told by CmdrTaco himself that he "deserved it" - why? Because apparently his "comment was dripping with sarcasm". Great! Glad that is clarified, you can rant about gay n*ggers all you want, but anybody that is sarcastic on Slashdot gets banned from posting for several days!

Two days later I am still banned, not sure about hans. It seems pretty clear from our correspondence with the /. editors that they aren't going to admit how stupid this mechanism is . That is their right, but you can rest assured that I won't be renewing my /. subscription, and I hope this prompts others to rethink theirs.

welcome to /.

[asv108]

I have never seen Taco admint to ANY major flaw in slashcode besides the page widening posts from back in the day. The fact is, this is not a customer oriented website. I use to subscribe to /. but decided not to fork over until the people who run this site decide to start taking customer requests seriously.

Re:welcome to /.

[bersl2]

Slashcode needs to be completely overhauled and reimplemented. In addition to all of this banning nonsense (I remember my first ban, for defending the subjunctive against idiocy), slashcode spits out HTML 3.2, and invalid [w3.org] HTML 3.2 to boot.

And another thing: Trying to search for something in Slashdot is like trying to find information by title alone in an unsorted library. And even then, you can only search for one word at a time. Seriously, there needs to be a full-text search.

Moderation bug

[GeorgeH]

This seems like a bug, not a feature. If banning for excessive negatives doesn't take into account excessive positive moderation you should submit a bug report [sourceforge.net] or a patch [sourceforge.net]. Of course, I don't know too much about being banned for comments, I'm assuming it's automatic and CmdrTaco doesn't just have a giant hard on for DRM.

Of course neither action guarantees that the Slash team would accept it, or even see it as a bug...

Re:They did

[Raindance]

I'd recommend submitting it as a bug to slashcode anyway. It seems as though it's a bug even if some folks don't call it that, and a bug submission would give the slash community a chance to review its status.

there are lots of problems with the voting system

[Artifex]

Including the fact that I haven't been able to moderate in close to 2 years. I've got excellent karma, metamoderate, and have posted a lot, but even in periods where I don't load the site up twice a day, I'm still restricted from voting directly. I was reading where, if I metamoderate something one way, but the majority of people moderated it another way, or I moderate and they metamoderate another way, then some stat associated with my reliability decreases. I'm thinking that must be what happened.

So, any

Re:there are lots of problems with the voting syst

[OldMiner]

Not reliability. Tokens. Not nearly as long lasting as you make it sound. One accumulates tokens randomly (by being logged in -- more likely if your "fairness" is high) and by things like metamoderating. And, yes, you do get penalized for metamoderating against groupthink, but only in tokens. Ones fairness rating is only based on M2 of his M1. I ramble a bit about these things in my last journal entry.

As a reference of how things can seem screwy: Last time I got moderation was about three weeks a

Alternatives

[k0fcc]

Well, there is always Tech Dirt [techdirt.com].