The end of “topic-flooding”?
Today has proven rather interesting, as we’ve encountered a phenomenon that we hadn’t expected to arrive so early. It is called “topic-flooding”, and we’re hoping that it’s something that’s now behind us.
A few new users joined up last night and became highly-active in the MakeFive Community. This was initially rather exciting, as we’re always happy to see new people join the community; however, their excitement around collecting points in the “What do you know” Contest seemed to get in the way a little. As a result, they started to generate reams of topics with little relevance to other users. Some rather pointless topics were created as a result (i.e. periods of the earth, top 5 types of metals, et cetera).
By mid-afternoon we were inundated with email from long-standing community members who were frustrated by this and felt that the site was being compromised by this behavior. We were inclined to agree, and had to look at how we could stem this from recurring.
MakeFive is really defined by the content. If we engage in intelligent, compelling discussions, we’ll have a great time, and the site will be good for all of us. If, on the other hand, we allow the content to erode, we’ll be left with a community that no one will want to contribute to. It’s in our best interests to keep the quality of content on MakeFive high.
All of the users in question were contacted and asked to stop topic-flooding; subsequently, each will be docked half of their accrued points as per the contest rules. If these users are found to be “gaming” the system again, they will have all of their points scrubbed and lose account privileges entirely. It’s our hope that this is a one-time incident, and that they’ll remain members of the community and take a little more time to contribute meaningful and well-considered content in the future.
In the meanwhile, we’re really looking to you, the senior members to lend a hand here. Please keep an eye out for system abuse. If you spot it occurring, please contact the offending member and explain what our community standards are. We can make this place whatever kind of a community we wish. I believe it will be a great one with insightful thoughts and spirited debate. :-)
Thanks all!
I don’t know if this is enough, especially for the 5 or so friends who were at the head of this spamming this weekend. Considering, that even 50% of the points would still have them ahead of most of the valuable users (platt, friessen, chrisj) (19,000 in a day for the top place person) and doesn’t address harassment of other members (TOP 5 SORE LOSERS OF MYFIVE) and an obvious disregard for the community itself.
it might also be good to remove some of those topics they added, because they just add clutter to be sorted around to get to the decent topics
Top 5 Alex Merced Songs
Top 5 Siblings
top 5 weather
top five people who should kill there selves
etc etc etc
Agreed–this has certainly been a difficult issue to resolve, and we’re really trying to take a balanced approach in dealing with it.
It’s our feeling that those who did the bulk of the topic flooding weren’t really doing so maliciously. We’re of the opinion that they simply needed to be reminded that the site is about good information and discussion, not the collection of points.
I suppose we could dock more points yet; however, I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt. All have apologized to the community and agreed to create better content in the future. That being said, it rests on our entire community to take note of bad behavior and personally call-out those who are abusing the system.
In weeks to come we’ll be adding more moderation tools as well. This will allow active users like you to make note of offenders quickly. As with all of these things, it just takes time to develop them; nevertheless, once they are in place, I believe we’ll be able to better root-out bad content before it starts to bubble out of control.
Thanks for your patience as we work out all of these issues. :-)