Suggestion: Implement Peer Moderation on SDF

Right, I forgot to add one thing. If the admin and mods decide to implement the report function further, maybe you can stem the report abuse by checking the case reported and then judge whether the report is reasonable or not. If it's not, take note of the reporter and probably tell them why you consider their report invalid (if you have the time to do so) so they won't do it again. I think having a template answer for similar cases would be ideal.

If there is a repeat offender of unimportant/invalid reports, time out their ability to report and give them a warning.

If they still abuse that function, a ban can be considered since:
a) They have been told and warned, and
b) because they intentionally flaunt the rules, they might be the ones you don't want in the forum anyway.

I'm sorry I came in late on this. But for what it's worth.

A type of deputy mods (peer modulation) from senior members here with reporting buttons that they can use to get the attention of an actual mod if things are felt to be getting out of hands. It may need to be from at least three deputies to report it before it warrant the attention of a mod.

Majority of post with discussion types here are current affairs. As we all sit around awaiting something exciting to happen in the hardware front. As such, I don't think mods are that interested in the general discussion/debates between members. But seniors members here are, and indeed participate actively, and thus are best placed to act as early warnings to other members.

Because most of the discussions/debates are current affairs, they can inevitably contain some degrees of politics. Overall from what I had seen and comparing to other forums I had visited. We are quite well behave. I suggest that we should have a separate section under which members of certain ranks or above (because to have survived to these ranks, we must be quite self constraint) can use to discuss/debate which can include politics. Any other members that do not wish to participate doesn't have to visit this section.

Also, I would like to suggest different types of sanctions for rule breakers. At the moment, it seems to be quite draconian without any recourse. Sometimes its a big jump from 1 week ban to 1 month ban with nothing in between.

Finally, we are know what happened with one of the mods who recently left us. His judgement was rather one sided, and with that leading to people being unnecessarily ban, and with that ban being carried over as further sanction. Maybe a review is needed to allow members here to continue as normal without that ban affecting their future sanction.

That's my few pennies worth

Thanks for listening .

I can see that there hasn't been any further discussion for a while, but I thought I'd chip in some thoughts.

solarz said:

This is why I propose a peer moderation system, like the one already used in many other social media sites. Members can upvote or downvote posts, and posts with a high downvote to upvote ratio will be automatically collapsed.

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I've yet to see a place where that isn't abused. It would lead to comments being collapsed because they were unpopular, not because they were abusive. There a lots of sub-reddits where this sort of thing happens all the time. In theory it's a decent idea but in practice it rarely works.

I would suggest to the forum owner of this forum to do a full backup of this forum, upload it as encrypted with AES-256 say with 7zip tool and with a long high entropy password... send the link to everyone so we can predownload the encrypted version of it, and if someday the time comes, it will be easy to release the password and we can all have local offline copy of this forum in said contingency situations.

And register some more Top Level Domains that is not .com just in case... announce ahead of time what they will be and have a list

and create a BitMessage channel (which cannot be taken down, unless the whole internet is taken down)

BMEWS said:

I would suggest to the forum owner of this forum to do a full backup of this forum, upload it as encrypted with AES-256 say with 7zip tool and with a long high entropy password... send the link to everyone so we can predownload the encrypted version of it, and if someday the time comes, it will be easy to release the password and we can all have local offline copy of this forum in said contingency situations.

And register some more Top Level Domains that is not .com just in case... announce ahead of time what they will be and have a list

and create a BitMessage channel (which cannot be taken down, unless the whole internet is taken down)

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestion. What is your reason for suggesting this?

WebMaster said:

Thanks for the suggestion. What is your reason for suggesting this?

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In the off chance however slight, that Trump forces prominent "China" forums offline... then at least there would still be people who were pre-seeded with offline copy....

Take r/sino for example, if US gov wanted it offline they just have to pressure Reddit.... but if they wanted SDF offline, they would go after the hosting, cloudflare/CDN, get Google to cut your ad revs, delist you from search engines, and possibly redirect your dns or a dozen other ways to go about it...

AES-256 for all intents and purposes is uncrackable given long enough password high entrophy... Sure you could put it inside a TrueCrypt or VeraCrypt container and run triple cascading ciphers but the 7Z AES-256 encryption is "good enough" and most people know how to use 7z, much less people use VeraCrypt or heard of TrueCrypt... you can generate a high entrophy 140 character length password using keepass and randomness from mouse cursor and keyboard typings, it will be long enough to be forever uncrackable but short enough to fit in a txt or twitter.

By doing this ahead of time you don't have to wait until last minute and it gives members time to each download a local copy (essentially seeding this site worldwide) and if the situation in the world never develops that it becomes that unstable then the day never comes and the decryption key never gets released and all is fine....

But say the world gets crazy in a couple months, Internet gets fractured or large part shutdown, and all China resources online get taken down, then at moments notice you can merely release the decryption key enabling all people worldwide who had previously cached/predownloaded the encrypted version to now have a full backup/copy of the entire SDF site unlocked and ready to be viewed/read locally and also that gives them the option to rehost it in the country/domain of their choice etc...

Consider it like a contingency plan and seed vault (knowledge vault) all rolled up in one... It would be a pity for all this information to someday be lost to the ether... It boils down to survivalbility planning, not necessarily of this site, but at least of the information itself. It is like insurance policy if you never have to use it, nothing is lost, there is no harm, but when if you do need it, would be good to have.

You could also implement some variant of the Shamir's Secret Sharing algorithm so that there is not a single point of failure in terms of controlling the password release. The nuclear minuteman for example has five teams of two, any two teams that agree on a launch will launch the nukes even if the other three don't concur. (or don't do anything) Same way, you can do for example a more conservative three out of five. So you designate five people (maybe moderators) in control of contributing to the release of the decryption key, if any three of the five members come together and agree to release then it gets released even if the other two members cannot be contacted or are out of communication or do not concur etc...

Thanks for the idea, something to think about. Although, I don't foresee the forum being shutdown but it is something to consider.

You think too much. we are a small forum and should not be targeted by any entity except some spammers.

There isn't even a button to report people. How do you report people?