To preface, I am not talking about spam bots who are trying to push products, scams and crap. If you ever see a comment, forum post or receive a PM from someone like this, please send us their username and we will erase all traces of them from the site. ModDB is a 100% spam free zone, and will always remain that way.
What I am referring to, is members spamming one another and their blog posts, which I am assuming they do to raise their "karma / activity points". To combat this, all members found responsbile are being banned (a few already), their comments erased and their karma / points reset to zero. If you are seen posting spam ANYWHERE on the site, this will happen to you too. Members, please report those you feel are spamming, so we can deal with them appropriately.
Secondly, because of these members immature actions, the karma / points system has been updated to only issue points on a unique basis. Spamming comments over and over as has been occurring will no longer help raise your level, it will only help you get banned. Same applies to forum posts, blog posts, news posts and everything else on the site.
The aim of ModDB, is to provide a community for game developers and players to share their thoughts and opinions with one another. Spam and nonsense ruins it for the majority who are here to better their skills and games, so please respect the rules and stick to insightful, meaningful discussion.
Karma Spam
It has been brought to my attention that members are also spamming karma and continually down voting certain members / mods they dislike. That too is just as bad and will be dealt with appropiately. I will be investigating a few reports of this to ensure this practice stops as well.
Previous spamming will be bannable, I have checked the logs and noticed a number of members who should be banned. At the moment I have banned the 3 worst, but will consider banning the rest if they are reported to me.
So they are not banned *yet* but are on seriously thin ice
thx for banning "spamerific", they suxed ma balls -.-
Seriously, I was about to punch their Canadian faces through the internets if something wasn't done about them...
There is this person, who has posted "NICE!" on many pictures and concept art from the mod Black Mesa. You mean he is rollerskating through fire and flames now?
Essentially yes. Posting NICE on the odd picture you like is fine, posting NICE on virtually everything is adding no value and is clearly spamming to increase your "level". Another option instead of banning is removing certain members ability to post comments, we have done that in the past
What about comments who got their Karma down for nothing?
If somebody is to be banned for spamming, also someone should be upped if he just suggested something and everybody voted him down - justice must work both ways, not only banning & deleting or castigating members.
Also cleansing from unjust votes or balancing mod/game ratings when they're clearly underrated b/c some trolls got their hands on voting.
Comments should be voted down only in a situation when the author abuses vulgar words (not directed at anyone in particular), justify anything very inappropriate (e.g. racism), ASO.
Not opposite/other opinions. Everyone should have a right to express his opinion, however different from others. And I've seen many people got their comments' Karma down just b/c they had expressed different opinions. Quite politely.
Its a different if you vote someones karma down because you want to shoff of or something or that you vote karma down becasue you dont agree with the comment
No, it isn't.
Negative Karma should be given only when somebody spammed, abused the amount of vulgar words, said something referring to explicit material or warez (but NOT published any links himself), and so on.
But for a different opinion? Just because you don't agree? You steal from that guy his activity points!
It's simply unfair.
You're right, different opinions is no reason to down karma a comment, however often on ModDB the way these "opinions" are declared is incredibly immature, usually along the lines of: "This game sucks, don't play it." That's not an opinion that's declaring something, others may like the game and it's hurting the development teams of those games(and mods).
I up-karma anyone I agree with or can declare his opinion in a mature way, most others are gonna get the minus from me.
No, I dont think, you should -karma when "Oh, he think yes, but I think NO, letss drop some karma", I agree with ya points.
Sry for ma bad expression
I agree with you on this one.
The worst case of down voting is being (sadly) Black Mesa page, if you express any doubt in any aspect of the mod you'll get -20 karma. Not that I care but it is so immature and so hateful towards the people who think differently and even explain their opinions. I'd have to say that e.g. No L4D2 group is/was so much more mature in this regard even though there was a flame war going on there you'd rarely see neg. karma spamming of aforementioned proportions...
the karma system may be crap, but it is there to allow the community to "self" moderate comments. the admins cannot look at every comment, so I cannot see a better way of doing this?
Plus it would take some seriously good programming to identify which comments are legit and good vs. which are not.
What about a karma system that requires you to put a reason for the +/- karma? Or maybe 2 separate systems, one for whether or not people agree with you, and one for being a troll/productive member of Moddb (Also requires a reason.)..
tastyspleen allows people who start threads to 100% moderate the thread themselves. They can remove any post they want. What about a system like that (I think our profile/mod comments allow that)? That would solve the "it's a lot of work for mods to handle & they can't be everywhere" & the "posting spam for ACHIEVEMENTS! :D :D :D" problems. If someone doesn't care they're being spammed it's their own fault. If they do care they'll take care of it.
Well I'd like to report a troll on modb who keeps on harassing people at random just for commenting on stuff not related to him. His name is iporto9393. Please ban him.
One question.
Why is the karma system still here?
I see no benefit other than first comments which dont say "First" get raised to heavenly heights, while anyone who doesnt agree or doesnt say "OMG LUV TEH MOD" gets sent to hell.
The karma system has become a joke and as such, even I refuse to take it seriously now. I usually tend to balance karma (bring down the highs, and raise the lows; making everything back to +1)
Yeah it the best example (I think) is the 'ability'-contest from The Rising. All the ideas of others were voted down because everyone wanted to win.
And yay for anti-spam measures! BTW, who cares about ranks/levels on forums/sites anyway.. I guess I'll never understand :P
That's what I said, ppl got voted down only b/c they don't agree. Plain ridiculous.
And AFAIK, it counts as activity points being decreased. For what? For a different opinion? -_-
Hmm, I like this. It's also a very serious aim in keeping ModDB spam-free.
I didn't even know however, there was such thing as karma points, I just commented on stuff I liked or disliked and stated my opinion...
Keep it on, team!
Someone to report:
the Spamerific accounts spam everywhere with the comment "spam" etc.
also on ma mod page voted someone all comments down and Kizzys votes get down
SPAM!!!I´m kidding...
Spammers need to be banned! (or kicked... if you want to give the guy another chance)
Silenced... banning is a way too heavy punishment. Bans only for posting really nasty stuff.
Since people get 1 karma point for each post, only spammers are interested in posting very little in substance to up their points. I believe in a zero tolerance policy for spammers, foul language, and a few others which I will not mention. A mistake is different. No one can tell me that they spammed 300 times by accident. Double hitting a post button may do it in rare cases.
Only those who want to spam themselves would complain about a ban on spammers. Just like criminals complain about the police being everywhere or cameras watching them. People who have not done anything wrong have nothing to worry about. But yes, there are those who are in power who abuse that power over those who don't, but I can't see that happening here, can you? Thanks ModDB for the crack down on real spiced ham!
you're assuming someone knows about the karma system & isn't just expressing their system. I had no clue how it worked until ~2 months ago.
What about mods/users that spam content? Mods/users get "credit" for that & some mods will put up 30 "WIP shots of the same thing, or stuff you can't really tell what it is? Can that be reported too? (hypothetical question)
Anything can be reported, so by all means do.
There should be option on mod "Enable/disable karma system on this mod page". Or other solution would be to see who karmed up and who karmed down. Otherwise karma system should be removed.
(Most of my comments and other people comments who say something like "good mod" got down karmed by some idiot on my mod page.)
We, developers don't have time to play karma wars or etc., so better do something.
there are a lot of communist spammers!
Instead of having Karma + or Karma - buttons for comments why not have 3 buttons: [Agree], [Disagree], and [Spam]?
Agree and Disagree points are shown for the individual comment to show how many people agree or disagree with the opinion but do not effect user karma. Spam is used to bury the comment if it's useless, abusive or immature and users who repeatedly have their comments buried as spam get flagged up.
Quite interesting idea. I think it should be given a chance.
I could see this system working, it sounds quite good!
I think that is a great idea as well. On the flipside, anyone who consistently issues excessive amount of "Spam" karma should also be flagged because they are probably abusing the system.
Ah crap, I didn't see this here, my last comment is pretty much what you just said... I definitely think that would work better than what we have now.
That's indeed a good idea thatmangleybloke.Also next to the 'Agree' and 'Disagree' options there could be a number inticating how many have agreed and how many have disagreed.Not like YouTube's system where when 3 agree and 4 disagree the comment shows -1.It should just show a red dot or something if there are more who disagree with it and a green one if there are more who agree.
Great idea!
I think I saw this somewhere else as well, would work great, doesn't sound hard to implement, but I don't know how the ModDB site is build up, so I could be wrong.
Good to hear something's being done about this.
Finaly, the Counter Spam force! good to hear that those spammers are getting what they deserve!
Try Gamerman12 as a karma troll.
I'm so glad you guys are doing this!
You MUST be kidding dude.
Like Intense said before, saying NICE or AWSOME in every picture is considered Spam so.. you better stop posting that kind of comments.
Yeah, I agree. You post a lot of one word comments on pretty much every single thing on Moddb it seems, try and post more thoughtful comments and stop trying to just increase your activity level...
yea i think thats better that you stop the spammers it was realy anoying
What about spam content? There is some dweeb posting a bunch of pictures of his ms paint zombie creature in the L4D profile.
I'm pretty sure that counts too, but the community can also report media, there's an exclamation mark that you can press at the top left of the image just for that..
I didn't want to report it because I wasn't sure it was breaking a rule. It was just annoying.
thnx 4 this
yeah there was this one guy who kept saying "very nice" on every picture and video he came across and it was so...for lack of a better term f***in annoying
Indeed there was, he made me rage.
oh yeah... good'ol nuash, I beleive his name was. Haven't seen him in a while, though.
(this comment wasn't relevant to any specific other comment)
Anyone notice how almost every comment is getting lots of + or - karma now? :D
As far as I understood, karma was supposed to be a 100% opinion system, so go in to a HL2 mod page & say "hl2 sucks, this is why" would get you near-instant - karma, regardless of how logical, polite, etc. you were. I could see people get a - karma carpet bomb too if they mention they refuse to work with pirated 3d software or the like, or anything else along those lines. In a case like that would the user get the -karma removed or would they be SOL because it was targeted spam vs general spam over the site?
I hope this doesn't apply to Croco. He always writes, "Cool" but believe me that adds enough worth in even simplest terms. :P