New little feature
As the spam rate at Antville.org is increasing I just added a small checkbox to the confirmation dialog when removing a member from a site.
If you tick the checkbox before clicking the “Proceed” button the members’s contributions to the site (ie. comments, images etc. of the member) will be erased before the membership is going to be deleted.
(Note: if the spammer – or troll – is not a member of your site you need to do some extra work by adding the user as member / subscriber first and then removing it with the checkbox ticked.)
Although this will not solve the general spam problem, it hopefully eases the cleaning-up for every site owner.
Please let me know what you think about this – especially, if you should experience problems with it.
kris
Here is a suggestion for a better interface. Just to make sure ppl. really read it.
tobi Verwaltung
Yes, I guess at least one additional confirm checkbox would be a good idea.
kris
three is more funny, though.
tobi Verwaltung
But the fun won’t last long enough, will it?
kris
let's make it 4 checkboxes, then.
kinomu Verwaltung
Hehe, "I do not really want to delete all contributions by the user" as the fourth question might catch those who habitually mark every checkbox.
kinomu Verwaltung
More seriously: I suggest
Warning!
You are about to delete 6 stories, 5 comments, 2 images and 0 files the user foo has added to this site. Please mind that this is an irreversible process and that other comments might get deleted too, in case they are in a threads below the stories or comments that you are about to delete. Furthermore, remaining comments might lose the postings they refer to, rendering a thread meaningless.
Are you sure you want to delete these items?
Cancel
This should reduce the risk of inadvertent deletion and vandalizing of threads, my main concern.
person
micro_robert
Nuke'em, Duke!
Vladimir Golombek
"What are You waiting for - Christmas?!"
kinomu Verwaltung
It works fine, but whenever someone is added and removed as a member, a confirmation mail gets sent to them (in case the entered address is correct, of course). I am not sure if these mails might remind the spammer where he posted and make him come back?
tobi Verwaltung
I guess we would need an extra action to avoid the notification. But then again, would we really want to let sane members to be removed silently from a site?
It is true that removing a member does not protect a site from future spam by this member because one does not need to be a member of a public site to comment.
(Changing this means one would have to subscribe to a site before being allowed to comment which I consider cumbersome.)
In the end probably only a site-wide user blocking feature will solve this issue... I am going to look at the necessary changes asap.
kinomu Verwaltung
In my view, the linking between membership and mass-deletion of spam is questionable.
I guess there are technical reasons why you designed it that way, because spammers usually don't subscribe to blogs and subscribers usually don't spam, so one would most likely have to add a spammer to the list of members before being able to batch delete his comments.
Besides, blocking a spammer site-wise is counterproductive, as they should be blocked on all Antville.org and their comments should be deleted from all blogs (via the sysadmins user administration interface), not just one or two.
tobi Verwaltung
The reasons are technical, only in respect of moving quickly. (Nevertheless, I found all of the recent spammers being subscribed to the site.)
I am still wondering where else to anchor the feature in the user interface.
Anyway, I do not think it is counterproductive at all to enable more users than just two or three admins to delete a bunch of comments from a site. Au contraire.
(Not being said that there should not be an option for removing users / comments from the whole installation. We are just not there, yet.)
kinomu Verwaltung
I don't know a more appropriate place in the user interface, either.
Except, maybe, automatically displaying "You have just deleted 5 contributions (i.e. comments, images,...) by the user foo. Do you consider him a spammer and want to delete everything he added to your site?" and, after confirmation, the yellow box with
Warning!
You are about to delete 0 stories, 516 comments, 271 images and 0 files the user foo has added to this site. Please mind that this is an irreversible process and that other comments might get deleted too, in case they are in a threads below the stories or comments that you are about to delete. Furthermore, remaining comments might lose the postings they refer to, rendering a thread meaningless.
Are you sure you want to delete these items?
Cancel
... and in case the delete button got clicked, removing the subscription automatically as well.
I think it would be ideal if every user whose contributions got batch-deleted by a site owner automatically got flagged as, say, "suspected spammer" so sysadmins were able to easily check if they consider their contributions as spam, too, and in that case remove everything.
If this were overly complicated, would it be feasible to automatically post a comment, e.g. on the help blog, stating that on some blog, all contributions of user foo got batch deleted by an owner?
tobi Verwaltung
I moved the checkbox from the membership’s confirmation dialog to the comment’s one. Thus, whenever one wants to delete a comment, one can opt-in to erase all the comments of the same user for the site.
Furthermore, I added an additional confirmation request by disabling the “Proceed” button as well as displaying another checkbox which re-enables the button. This should prevent at least some accidents.
I think this is much better as the comment creator does not need to be a member of the site. What do you think?
kinomu Verwaltung
I couldn't imagine a more intuitive to find place for the dialogue, it just needs some fine-tuning.
I wouldn't display the option when one deletes a comment written by oneself as in my opinion, this increases the risk of errors and "thread-vandalizing" out of transient anger (at the owner of the blog) without doing any good.
And to further reduce the risk of erroneous/inconsiderate deletions, I suggest a stronger second warning, like
Warning!
You are about to delete all 516 comments the user foo has added to this site. Please mind that this is an irreversible process and that other comments might get deleted too, in case they are in a threads below the comments that you are about to delete. Furthermore, remaining comments might lose the postings they refer to, rendering threads meaningless.
Are you sure you want to delete these items?
Cancel (I guess it is intended that stories, images, files and memberships will not be deleted as well.)
tobi Verwaltung
I think providing the option for the creator enables oneself to remove all one’s comments from other sites which I consider a good thing as it increases autonomy for each user.
I see the thread vandalizing issue but this can only be solved by features like soft comment deletion or the like.
The altered warning is a good idea but would need more exhaustive implementation.
Even just displaying the number of comments cannot be done the quick fix way the checkboxes were added. It went into the source repository, though, and already works very well in another Antville installation: