inability to edit other's 'quotes'

Started by drewactual, July 25, 2018, 09:34:57 AM

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drewactual

i've looked through the mod site and don't see this. 

it's a jerk move many on my board have taken to doing- using the quote function and then altering the quote in effort to make it appear the other poster said or posted something they didn't. 

i don't know if this is a simple thing or not- it has cascading impacts, i realize this, and why i bring it here. 

thoughts?

thanks!

Arantor

Massively complex and whatever you do, fairly trivial to get around assuming you leave the other formats of quote available (where you don't attribute to a specific post, but without attribution or with a custom attribution)

I'd also be wondering why we need a technical solution to a social problem. This is what warnings and bans are for ;) If your members feel like being jerks, you don't really want them around anyway.

drewactual

i'd like to retain as many eyes as possible, but you're right- it's a 'social' problem. 

the nature of the page in question is debate- so it's going to jump the fence from banter to malicious from time to time- and though nobody has mentioned what i bring up i'm thinking it's only a matter of time before they do..

Kindred

honestly, except in cases of amusement, I have never seen someone edit a quote inline to their post...
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SychO

Quote from: Kindred on July 25, 2018, 11:23:38 AM
honestly, except in cases of amusement, I have never seen someone edit a quote inline to their post...

I've been in quiet a few forums, and honestly you'd be surprised to see how childish some people can be

I think there's a bbcode permissions mod, but it's only compatible with 1.1.x, so that's a no go.
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Gwenwyfar

Quote from: SychO on July 25, 2018, 11:39:24 AM
Quote from: Kindred on July 25, 2018, 11:23:38 AM
honestly, except in cases of amusement, I have never seen someone edit a quote inline to their post...

I've been in quiet a few forums, and honestly you'd be surprised to see how childish some people can be

I think there's a bbcode permissions mod, but it's only compatible with 1.1.x, so that's a no go.
Indeed. Though I've mostly seen people playing with it, hardly turning into a fight other than user A getting offended by the edit by user B. The original post is always there to confirm who said what.

So... the ban and moderation options are there to be used ;)
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

Kindred

Quote from: SychO on July 25, 2018, 11:39:24 AM
I've been in quiet a few forums, and honestly you'd be surprised to see how childish some people can be

no I would not... I've been running forums since 1990. :P

However, in all that time, I literally have never seen someone quote a post and purposefully edit the quote.
I've seen people MISquote (using plain text)... or purposefully misunderstand...   but never using the actual quote feature

And even if they did...   removing the ability to edit an actual quote box?   People could just do something like this...

PschO said:
I've been in quiet a few forums, and honestly you'd be surprised to see how childish some people can be

and edit THAT text...

As Arantor pointed out -- you are looking for a technical solution to a social problem - and that will never actually work.
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Gwenwyfar

Maybe you have been to mostly serious forums. It was extremely common in the one I managed. You'd be surprised by the number of deemed "completely useless" features and things they did (and I say this based on comments here in SMF). I also had to constantly check some mods for exploit holes, since even mentions got exploited.

Likes mod was also a "fun" one... they made a bot to downvote a single post into 500, with a goal to reach 5000 negative points for luls. Someone was also amassing mentions in his page, at some 4000 unread ones. You'd think that is a large community but it was 30 active users at best...

I gave them dice rolls, they started using it to randomly get members to annoy, by rolling on member ids. Etc. You get the idea :P

Another fun fact: In the same "genre" of forums, there was a larger one going on for 10+ years, that not even those members could stand. So you imagine the level of that.
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

Kindred

As I said... a social problem.

that gets fixed with a social solution.  Ban them until they behave themselves.
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"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Gwenwyfar

I'm not denying that.

Quote from: Gwenwyfar on July 25, 2018, 12:43:56 PM
Quote from: SychO on July 25, 2018, 11:39:24 AM
Quote from: Kindred on July 25, 2018, 11:23:38 AM
honestly, except in cases of amusement, I have never seen someone edit a quote inline to their post...

I've been in quiet a few forums, and honestly you'd be surprised to see how childish some people can be

I think there's a bbcode permissions mod, but it's only compatible with 1.1.x, so that's a no go.
Indeed. Though I've mostly seen people playing with it, hardly turning into a fight other than user A getting offended by the edit by user B. The original post is always there to confirm who said what.

So... the ban and moderation options are there to be used ;)

Though, in that particular case, it wouldn't have worked, because that's what the community was after. That was the default and considered fun, not an offense. Intervention was only when someone was offended by any of it, which normally wasn't the case :P

Heck, me putting code blocks in place to not break things and giving occasional warnings was already enough for them to treat me like some hitler, because the bugs were "part of their fun" :D
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

vii

Quote from: drewactual on July 25, 2018, 09:34:57 AM
i've looked through the mod site and don't see this. 

it's a jerk move many on my board have taken to doing- using the quote function and then altering the quote in effort to make it appear the other poster said or posted something they didn't. 

i don't know if this is a simple thing or not- it has cascading impacts, i realize this, and why i bring it here. 

thoughts?

thanks!

If the quote metadata is still there, it's as simple as pulling the body of each msg ID of each quote in the person's post when they make/modify a post, and then comparing to what what is in the post. But like Arantor said, all they have to do is remove the link attribution to get around that. If they do that, the only semi-accurate way would be to get every single post in the thread and look for posts that are similar to the quoted text, but how accurate can you expect it to be? After all, the forum code doesn't inherently "know" what the original text was.

The best you can do is look up each post -IF- the quote has the link parameter. You'd just have to consider this new feature a partial solution, assuming you'd rather have something than nothing, because it's not feasible to make it cover all possible ways of editing the quote.

Kindred

and that could get to be an EXPENSIVE query

Since we're talking about people who pruposefully try to misuse or break things, Someone could potentially make a post with 500 quotes. Each of those would have to preform a lookup/compare. Your server would slow to a crawl.


(and Gwen... no, most of the forums that I have run have been for fun and/or games... even in my dial-up days.  So, I don't know where you folks are finding these people, lol)
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Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

Gwenwyfar

Quote from: Kindred on July 25, 2018, 01:09:39 PM
(and Gwen... no, most of the forums that I have run have been for fun and/or games... even in my dial-up days.  So, I don't know where you folks are finding these people, lol)
Non-english communities may explain a huge part of that I suppose xD

I was thinking of saying it's the genre it's in, but even most english forums of the same topic that I have seen were way too serious by comparison.

[/end of offtopic comments, unless someone cares enough to move this]
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

Arantor

I've been members of forums like those. I've even participated ;D

Imagine telling a highly technical forum that the forum is impervious to bots. Imagine the depths a place like that will go to, just to prove the assertion wrong.

Gwenwyfar

They can be fun :laugh:

To my luck, most of the members had little technical knowledge, so many things went unnoticed (specially mod bugs). I ended keeping the randomly locking topics bug because it got a rep as "the ghost/curse of the forum".

It was only one user that had bots, but since it was his day job to make bots and analyze data, he already had things built that he could just adapt to SMF. He even started posting content and making games with it, using mentions as a trigger. So you could mention his name anywhere and his bot would try to reply something relevant to that topic, or start a game (some were mini-RPGs). This was after I asked him to disable his likes bot, that was targeting one user's posts. I can only imagine what would happen if you have a whole host of them intentionally exploiting a forum :laugh:
"It is impossible to communicate with one that does not wish to communicate"

Arantor

We discovered a slew of interesting behaviours of that forum software - and the one it was eventually replaced with.

njtweb

I've seen members completely reform the entire context of the quote A LOT on pro hockey forums. It happens often, in fact more than often. However some tend to be slightly respectful and they'll bold the specific text they change and then respond outside the quoted text "Fixed". I've been a member of one extremely large pro hockey niche website for 15 years and it's done almost on a daily basis in just about every forum on the site.

Some of the mods clean up the garbage but over the years as NHL hockey's popularity has changed in different areas, a lot of the original higher level members and mods have left, now the site has become more of a keyboard warrior forum with members picking fights with each other than anything else. As others have said, its up to the management of the forum to keep this kind of activity in check. If they let it go they let it go.

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