Regarding the Frequent Spam Comments on Hacked Games

[POWERMAN]

This is actually a problem that was first brought up by ExpoundParadox (perhaps unbeknownst to him, as he was using this problem to make a point).

Also, before you make a post, I advise you to read the full post before giving an opinion.

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...because when you scroll through the comments you will notice that if one single person says something bad about the game like "i like teh game but needs blah-blah-blah" or "dis game isnt very good and needs some work" then they will most likely have about -30 to -50 "thumbs downs" for just giving their opinion, while if someone were to comment "pretty graphics" or "selectLOL is teh best hacker like if u agree!!!" then they will have about +30 to +50 "thumbs up" for their useless comments or "spam". Some people even say " I HACKED ME LIKE BAR SO YOU CAN THUMBS IT UP AS MUCH AS YOU WANT!!11! TRY IT!!!" or "like if your straight" and these people would get about +80 likes for their TRUE SPAM....

So this is our current problem as I see it:
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1. The comment system is not fulfilling its purpose as a message board where users can share thoughts and discuss or even compliment the hack/hacker (read on). The comment board has turned into the slums of message boards, where there are countless comments turning into bland, worthless spam such as "selectLOL is the best hacker" and "like if you're straight" (not to say selectLOL is not worthy of the highest commendation). The former comment of which has an unique, sole purpose of generating likes for the ubiquitous "like whore" that can also be found on YouTube and Facebook. The latter comment is purely homophobic slur that can offend same-sex sexuality users of APH and also turn away users, generating a bad impression of APH around the Internet.
2. Those who do attempt to actually give their opinion (though often unconstructively) are often downvoted badly, discouraging any more opinion-giving and the possibility for an actually well-constructive comprehensible comment. This will, again, reduce overall impression of the site, and decrease the reputation of APH as an alternative games site on the Internet.
3. Often there are flamers on comments, and also people who start fights on the comment threads, often arguing about something that isn't worth starting an Internet fight over. It reduces APH's rep on the Interwebs.

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​Currently, our major problem with comment boards is the negative impressions that these trite and worthless comments, Internet fights, controversy posted by flamers, and discriminatory/offensive comment
[/COLOR]that is on almost every game on APH.

This altogether will negatively affect ArcadePreHacks' reputation as an alternative games site on the Internet.

I invite you to read my roommate's first impression of APH upon visiting the website. Keep in mind that these are his exact words transcribed and pasted just today. I invited him to inspect and review the community.

People will know that on this site, you can't expect to find a serious review. All you will see is idiots arguing over 50-Cent and JaRule or whatever. If this is the level the majority of members that this site that you go on a lot is at, then I won't make an account. It's not worth the trouble of of all the spam on the comment boards. Now, because I have seen you communicating with some intelligent people on there, I know that the guys running this site is smart. But remember, I'm 25 and I come from a family of reason and logic. I can't speak for the teenagers whose hormones run wild and the high school dropouts roaming on the Internet. If you want this website to thrive, then you need to clean up the scum on the comment boards. Have some reviews that give me information about the game, about the hack instead of telling everybody how heterosexuality is the superior sexuality.

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There you have it, firsthand information.

ArcadePreHacks is a developed sites which generates thousands of American dollars a year. Only with active users and increased site traffic can this site grow. The worthless comments on the boards is working exactly against that common goal to make APH a better place shared by admins, mods, and some members alike.

So, if a few staff or mods recognizes the severity of the problem and how it occurs on virtually every comment board on hacked games and can affect the future of APH, please give me a sign of approval, and I will elaborate on the solution to the problems.

Though software engineering is my major, I am an avid pursuer of knowledge of pyschology. I myself have personally observed group dynamics and other aspects of psychology. Gestalt ecounter groups, corporate brainstorming procedures, and Japanese managerial techniques are only a few areas that I have observed. I have watched as a guest and performed private experiments observing group and community behaviour alike. I proffer my knowledge to make APH a better place before moving on to pursue deeper study in the field of psychology. Rest assured, if you seek information regarding social aspects of an online community, I can offer somewhat intermiediate information regarding your question.

Have a good one!



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[ZuckeR]

This comment spam is common on all sites that allow user comments. It simply shows that the users of APH are mainly children and teens. The problem i see is just that there is no viable solution if you want to keep the comments. The only way is to approve every comment by reading it and this needs a lot of moderators.

[POWERMAN]

APH is different from sites that allows user comments. Why not take a look at Kong? Not to offend any of our users, but their user comments are higher in a level of taste, integrity, readability, purpose, constructiveness, thought, and intelligence. Perhaps our users only need some minor coaxing.


Which brings me to refute your point about approving every comment. There is simply no need for this extraneous addition to the APH staff.

Through encouraging our users to write higher level comments, we can get higher level comments overall. Using subliminal messaging perhaps, or a few simple lines of text above the comment box reminding you the expectations one's comments are needed to be. I have done this with other communities (forums for gaming servers, so I do actually know how to deal with minors).

We can also compose a few rules for writing comments.

Again, I think we should consider this spam from different aspects.

Is the comment board implemented for the sole purpose of showing that the demographics of the site are mainly of the teen/children range?

Would we even need a comment board to prove such a minor point? If that is not what the comment board's use is intended for, what should it be used for?

What should the comment board be like, ideally?

[selectLOL]

You are right, but there are other problems. At first, this site is build on a site script, so we have a lot of work on getting it work. Then, kongregate has a lot of staff. I can say more than the half of our users are children, then some teenagers and adults on this site are rare. On kongregate you have to fear to get banned or a warning if you spam, we dont have enough staff on the site to do that. Kongregate has also a reporting system. If we make a reporting system and more staff to handle spam, i fear it gets abused.

So where do we get the staff to handle the work? On kongregate there is a comunity of players, and if you act mature you can get promoted. We dont have such a comunity, so this way of getting staff is not possible.

The next problem is, the site and the forum dont share bans. If you get banned on the site, you can still get online in the forum.

And i can say you, the average user has a low level. I see it every day. Even reading the simple rules is to hard for them. So making a eduaction project would be more helpful.

In short, this site is used by little children and wanting high level comments is too much. I agree with removing the spam, but getting high level comments is impossible. Most of them dont understand what they are doing.

[POWERMAN]

And now so I agree with the quote in your signature. It truly is "easier to find intelligent life in the universum than in the internet."

But it would appear so that you are right. I would be expecting too much to get higher level comments from our userbase. Kong and APH are different worlds.


I'll take it back to your post in which you say that you agree with preventing the spam. Question how will we do so? There are several ways to approach this.

One, we can use extraneous moderation and patrol on the comment boards that ZuckeR said won't be efficient and will need a lot of staff.

Or two, we can prevent the spam beforehand using some sort of filter. I remember before APH's "remodeling", there was a filter in the comment box which turned profanity into the word "love", and that was effective on keeping vulgarity out of the comment boards. Perhaps we can do something like that, except with spam. We can find out how most of the spam is structured, and input that structure into the filter.

For example, when the filter finds the words "like if you're" in a user comment, then that comment cannot be posted. Every time a user tries to post such a comment, he gets a warning (seperate from the forum, as you say the forum and site don't share bans). Three strikes and you're out, similar to the system on the forums. Because machines are without prejudice, there will be no abuse with this system. We also don't need a myriad of staff this way either.

We can always construct later. The importance is in the dreaming.

[selectLOL]

Well, if you want to filter them, there is a list of the most used words:

• Bieber is gay <- i think most of us can agree with this
• This comment is hacked
• Thump up if you
• Thump down if you are not
• Please hack

Thats the most used spam. The other is just random spam which has to be deleted manually. We are currently blocking some words and links. But filtering all doesnt bring much, they are spammers and trolls, they find a way to bypass it.

And if you want to see the real spam, open the shoutbox. Sometimes 4chan is looking better than it. http://www.arcadeprehacks.com/page/11.html

You are right, there has something to be improved. Not only on the site, the forum included. For example, look at request your hacks. Spam, not allowed, already requestd/hacked. No one cares about the rules there. I had the idea to make something like programs are using, you have to agree that you read the rules and know them. I know an other site, you have to pass a test before you can register. Its a simple test about the rules what you are allowed to do and what not.

I would suggest social engerring. Some sites allow users to connect accounts with facebook accounts, so you can log in with your normal account or your facebook acount. If you can log in with your face book account, a site gets more interesting for teenagers and people in this age. This would increase the level of our users.

But the biggest problem is still the community and there is no real goal in the community. If you look at kongregate, what can you do?
Earn points <- goal of the site
Earn achivments <- goal of the site
Talk about multiplayer games

What can you do on APH:
Play hacked games

So there is no real goal, this results in trolls and spammers. I think there should be a function to disable comments, so you cant see them if you dont want. You can turn it on or off in your userprofile.

I think i will talk with Xnite about 1 or 2 moderators for the site, but the problem is there is no log function. We want a log of everyone who deleted or edited something (this is for staff only, to controll the work).

[Xnite]

Good discussion. Thanks Powerman for raising the issue and sharing your thoughts. We are interested in improving this. But as usual we have multiple projects and limited resources. So it's a matter of determining its priority in our todo list and then slotting it in.

At this stage I can't say when it will be worked on but I believe at some stage it will be. So please feel free to continue to share your thoughts on the best way to tackle this difficult problem. We will certainly think over all the suggestions here before we take action.

[POWERMAN]

Here's a thought, Xnite. I have plenty of time and resources to work on this. I can develop this idea and present it to you guys when you are ready to work on it. In fact, I have many ideas on how to improve the site with my expertise and also knowledge.

@selectLOL, 4chan is better looking then this, speaking from my inner /b/tard-ness.

Also, isn't social engineering used to incorporate youself into a gaming community, become trusted, and destroy the whole freaking server? That's what I thought it was for.... Lawl.

[Xnite]

I am starting to think about this. No solid plans on when, but I am interested in solidifying the what. Powerman, please feel free to PM me with your ideas.

One question comes to mind though, what do we classify as spam. It seems from the posts so far, people are suggesting any kind of like whoring should be considers as spam. That is one way to look at it. To us, as older, maturer users, it certainly looks like spam. But we really should think about whats best for the majority of users. Like whoring seems to be an incredibly popular activity in the comments. It seems to have turned into a meta game that the community enjoys and has embraced, by not just those trying to get the likes, but those who give the likes too.

If it wasn't a popular and accepted activity then surely every comment that had any kind of like whoring aspect would be thumbed down and eventually deleted by the system.

So, lets assume it is a popular and accepted meta game played by the users. If we do anything to discourage that game, then yes, the comments might become better quality in our eyes, but we may just be taking away a game that the users enjoy playing.

The former owner of this site actually had plans not to fight it, but to reward it. I think he figured what's the point of going against the crowd. If the users enjoy the meta game of thumbing up, and seeing how many thumbs a comment can get, then why not do something to make that meta game more rewarding, more fun. He probably had plans to do some kind of point system where the more thumbs up you had the more points you got.

At this stage I'm not saying we should discourage it or encourage it. I'm just saying there are two sides to this. We have to think about the users and what they like doing. Taking away an activity that the majority of users seem to enjoy would not be an improvement in their eyes. And at the end of the day we have to improve the site for whatever the largest demographic our users are.

On the other hand, there clearly is some legitimate spam that needs to be discouraged. That kind of spam I'm not talking about in this post.

[POWERMAN]

From my "professional" standpoint of view and also the facts that you have stated above, I believe there are two ways to classify spam.

Also, I am familiar with the former owner's standpoint. I also have vague memories of him stating it in a post on ATF, or that simply may be my imagination at work here.

Anyways, back to the spam.

1. Flame, hate, links.

This is the hateful arguing, offensive comments, and idiocy that "looks worse than 4chan" (as stated by selectLOL). Often there are discriminatory comments. Whether it's racial, gender-related, sexuality or more, it's all on there. Not only is this spam crap, to put simply, think what it'd do to the children that browse APH. Don't forget, children are the majority of the demographic that browse APH.

2. Like Whoring

Though the comments may not appear offensive and simply expresses one's opinion (in a extremely like whoring way), there are affronts such as "like if your straight" or "like if your not a gaytard" and a myriad of more vulgarity. Would this not offend the same-sex or other sexually oriented members of the community? Though you don't see them being active, but they are. "Homos" are casted as social pariahs from the comment boards. Dogma splattered and smeared under the games of APH. This is the metagaming I believe you are referring to, Xnite.

Though it may be wise not to remove the constant like whoring, remember that it often embodies vulgar affronts and ribald humor.