The title is a good summary.
Trools: Your Thursday Headquarters. At the Intersection of the Trolls and the Rules.
A Better Life.
Better Government.
More and Better Democrats.
More and Better Democratic Politicians.
More and Better Democratic Office Holders.
These goals are why we are here and they seem to imply
More and Better KOSsacks.
Where do they come from? They either follow a link from somewhere else or they hear about us on the news or a friend clues them in. They arrive knowing nothing about our mores and many make mistakes. Please be nice and don't let it get personal. Sometimes it's a troll but more often than not it's someone having a bad day or has made an error in cognition. Sometimes a little bit of education goes a long way.
Remember the goal: More and Better KOSsacks.
Most who would join us have already heard of us. We're not a viral meme anymore. Be nice to strangers and be nice to those having a bad day. Help guide the lost back onto the Orange Path. Please?
That being said some are up to no good. People experience conversion of one kind or another, an account gets hijacked, astroturf, ratfuck, psychotic, or Redstate. There it is. Right there in the thread. A troll. Maybe it wrote a diary. How to tell at DK4? More importantly, what to do?
These diaries are about techniques rather than personalities.
The technical means related to catching (or concealing) sock puppets are off limits. Don't give the bad actors any help.
Search
Comment search is still under repair. IE users cannot search comments at all. One of my routine searches is to find every comment that has been HRed. The dawn patroll goes back ten days looking for late hits. I noticed this morning that a comment written today could not be located in the list of comments generated by searching every comment using today's date. It turns out that for search purposes a comment is dated the same as the publication date of the diary to which it is attached regardless of when it was written or posted. That also applies to preposted tip jars.
When DK4 went live comment search failed completely if the start date was earlier than 1JAN2010. Now it still fails but it's a soft fail. Only comments written after that date are returned.
Trusted Users
Trusted Users, TUs, can see hidden comments, hide rate comments, edit tags, and form groups. The exact formula for TU status is not revealed but observation reveals that two key features of all TUs is that they registered at least 120 days ago and have posted at least one comment. Posting a diary does not seem to be a requirement. I would like to introduce willie2011 as an example of the least trustworthy TU ever. Before yesterday willie2011 had only posted two comments and they had three things in common, they were HRable, had no HRs, and did not receive a single uprate. This user is not a subscriber, has not written any diaries, is not following any users, groups, or tags, and until the donuts started coming in had no followers either. Since then this useless user has written four comments, all of them hidden with one unfortunate uprate, and tossed five abusive donuts. The user is still trusted.
It turns out that it is possible to reduce the mojo level of a user but it takes a lot of donuts and the case is instructive. Let me introduce leftcoastghost, notorious RKBA troll. After a remarkable period of increasing abuse RKBA decided that HOS made sense and after many hidden comments unleavened by succor, mojo was reduced from four to three. Yesterday, after one HRed comment and one hidden comment, mojo plummeted from three to zero and at this time a nosub condition exists. Strangely enough the mojo isn't bony. I find it very hard to believe that an admin stepped in.
Admin Moderation
Administrative moderation is much reduced now but is not gone. In theory spammers, troofers, and zombies are administratively banned but I'm not seeing a consistent pattern.
This diary started out as a right wing troll diary as is evident from the comments and the donuts. Looking back later it has been replaced by spam. The diarist, Olinto, is unbanned at this time.
bob zimway has said that he no longer wants to post here and decided to bless us with Troofer ideas in his recent diaries. Unsurprisingly donuts changed hands but bob zimway is still a trusted user and subscriptions are still available
CHIPSHIRLEYDOTCOM is on his third time around the block and unbanned in spite of many donuts. Discussion and links to all three accounts are here.
Third Party Advocacy
There has been some discussion of late regarding whether this is a Democratic site dedicated to Democratic electoral victory. I believe that it is. Arguing that we need a third party to compete with Democrats is counter productive, arguing that we need a revolution in the United States is counterproductive, and I believe that those who advocate either of these positions are a detriment to the site mission. kos has been silent on the matter of late but Meteor Blades weighed in thusly:
The rule has always had a subtext... (20+ / 0-)
...that it is OK to talk about third parties in the abstract, about the (alleged) need for them and how they would improve the country if we had strong ones. Those who do so should expect a strong reaction, but it's not against the rules. What's been forbidden is advocating that people vote for third parties in elections where Democrats are running against Republicans. There could always be exceptions — say, advocating for Sen. Sanders in a race with a Democrat — but these would be rare.
Don't tell me what you believe. Tell me what you do and I'll tell you what you believe.
by Meteor Blades on Tue Apr 12, 2011 at 01:29:10 PM EDT
That is as clear a statement as we are likely to get.
A Special Note
I cannot believe that a KOSsack would write this or uprate it:
exactly - and kick the president's ass
while you're at it.
And take a baseball bat to his worst appointees like Geithner, Summers (yeah he's not there now, but still needs to hear from a bat), Daley and Immelt.
Immelt? What do you melt Immelt? Oh reactor cores and spent fuel pools and middle and working class jobs (aka the economy). Of course.
Give this president hell. He's earned it.
And remember that he says we have to make him do the right thing. So make the charismatic frontman for evil (Wall Street, the MIC and the mis-Fortune 500) do some fucking good for a change.
And tell him if he makes one more grandiose speech and then "caves" like a GE containment vessel, I will do everything in my power as a citizen to stop him from being our president in 2012.
This lesser of two evils bullshit is going to stop.
“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world, is either a madman or an economist.” ~Kenneth Boulding
by Earth Ling on Thu Apr 14, 2011 at 12:01:11 PM EDT
This comment was directed to Members of Congress. We are not credible agents of peaceful democratic change if we allow violent rhetoric such as this. Why would any elected official even care about our views if we allow this?
The dev team assures us that 'Mojo Milestone' is coming but it is obviously not here. The current scheme of light Admin Moderation in conjunction with untrusted TUs and a comment hiding formula of 7x +1 donuts where x=recs means that no user, no matter how heinous their position, will be banned if they have the slightest support even if that support is obviously from trolls.
Updated by aoeu at Fri Apr 15, 2011 at 08:51 AM EDT
The dev team pushed an update last night which appears to affect hidden comments. Elfling:
Rounding error in the mojo and comment hide rating calculations corrected.
A quick check shows that a comment can be hidden at (4+ / 24-). How this affects comments in the past is under investigation. I suspect that there is a 'latch' for hiddenness as comments that had been hidden under the old formula, two recs no hides or 3x + 1 where x=HRs, are still hidden.
Updated by aoeu at Fri Apr 15, 2011 at 09:31 AM EDT
More checking indicates that the formula for hiding a recced comment is 3x +1 where x=recs. This is a big improvement, taking us back to a system that worked, and I would like to thank the dev team for finding and fixing the 'rounding error' that has caused so much grief over the last few weeks.
Whether it takes two HRs or three to hide an unrecced comment is still an open question.