Architecht

Looks like you are looking for the second bullet in my original post.

I added a rule about surcharges for PayPal (or other services if they restrict it). I am also closing this idea - so no explicit action. I'm not adding a rule that expressly allows or disallows it. I'll leave it up to a combination of member complaints and moderator judgement whether something is conforming to the "only offered on the boards" rule.

Hm. Well, there is a limit to the total number of new conversations that can be started in a day. That restriction has been in place since we started with the new boards, but it has been set at 50 - so I'm not sure why you saw a limit of 25. We put that limit in to prevent people from using the PM system as some kind of spam machine. I just upped the limit to 100, though.

I'm only sort of aware of this one, but here's how I would state moderation position on this kind of question: We don't allow personal paypal for two reasons. It deprives buyers of protections that they should give up, and It's explicitly against the terms of use of PayPal If either of those things are also true about asking for an extra 3% for paypal, then I think we would veer towards disallowing it. If I understand things correctly, it's ok with PayPal if you say something like "3% discount for cash/check", though? I'm not familiar enough with the specific terms of PayPal use to know in this case what is and isn't acceptable. But if we see enough abuse of those terms, we'd clarify it and add it to the posting guidelines.

Hm... yeah, that's interesting... I'd say that I would be concerned someone would end up in a PM conversation trying to "buy" the book, and then get burned. If we leave the bait up, it may catch someone. Also, it would create a need to make judgement calls about what is a simple guidelines violation versus what is a scammer. Guidelines violation would need to be removed, while scams would be locked, but there would be a large grey area in between. That will get messy. Theoretically, if they try again under the same terms, their posts will just be removed again. If they just make a new fake account they may not be caught anyway even if we leave their previous attempts up. There probably isn't an ideal treatment here. I might trend towards less complexity in that case. Thoughts?

ah! Yes, I see that now. We'll file a bug with the boards maker. I agree that it's frustrating for that to fail silently, @Scott =)

@DeadOne @skypinkblu and anyone else on this thread - to bring it more back on topic: Is anyone regularly experiencing these challenges at this point? The intent is that a normal user is rarely / never challenged with a captcha screen. So if you are still seeing these as of today with any regularity, I'd love to know. Thanks!

I think I can help provide you some perspective on a few of these things. I'm really an escalation point on boards issues rather than any day-to-day responder to issues. I tend to deal with moderation at a policy level, and boards performance and design at an oversight level. I check in, and occasionally respond directly to users just to add a little more communication where I can and because I value the community and like to stay in touch at a direct level where I can. I do tend to try to respond in brief. I think your frustration with these issues stems from a mismatch of expectations. You would like a community interaction process where all requests are responded to promptly, minor and major issues of any sort always get an answer as well as frequent updates along the way. That sounds pretty ideal to me as well, but alot of the types of issues you advocate for are lower priority issues for a variety of reasons. The issue doesn't impact that many users It's a preference request that there isn't major support for and/or has other side effects that we don't consider desirable It would be nice to do, but it's unclear how to achieve it The issue can easily be worked around so it is an inconvenience rather than a blocker It's possible to do, but probably would take too much time/resources/cost to be worth it We always want the boards to be better, and the users to be happier, but we do also have to make priority decision on what to address. Sometimes that means that your comments will go into the "suggestion box", will get read, but won't really have any effort allocated to resolving them. That isn't because we don't care. It's because we have to make decisions about where to focus time and energy. So, for example, this week the team has spent time on board performance and scalability. The security changes were an outcome of that attention. It cut a bunch of malicious and/or spider activity out and improved things. The team deployed a point release of the boards that addressed a variety of issues. The team is also currently testing and executing on a move of attachment storage to a new location in order to avoid running out of disk space and shutting the boards down. They have also spotted a system issue on the NGC boards that was eating 10GBs of storage with duplicate javascripts and made sure it was resolved. There are many more projects and issues being worked on across other web and mobile assets as well. Lots of these things are beneficial to everyone, and generally higher priority than some of the requests and issues that arise more directly from the members. We are very interested in suggestions and problem reports, and we do read them, but we are not guarantying a response to every item raised by the membership. You can think of it more like a suggestion box rather than a ticket system.

What? No credit? Man. tough crowd.

Maybe I'm just afraid that too many accolades would make me lazy. Sometimes a trophy is just atrophy.

Phew. It sure does. The trophy thing especially scares me. I have this recurrent dream of a giant trophy falling on me. Is that weird?

Response to some of the quick issues to address: Likes - probably not going to increase this substantially, but if a modest number of people all still want more likes, I could see raising the ceiling a bit Gallery visibility - I added a sidebar for recent gallery additions Window for invisible edits - no way to do this. We can either allow ALL edits to be invisible (which I don't like), or none. We have no setting to allow invisible edits for X minutes or anything like this. Given the two choices, I prefer visible edits so people can tell if original post content was altered after people responded. Ask CGC - not handled by moderation - no opinion Old journal migration - not sure of the status on this one. Ignoring specific threads - no facility on the boards for this one. There might be a plugin out there for this, but I don't think I'm in favor of people narrowing their exposure to topics the community is responding to. I think if you are ignoring the original poster, though, then that thread is not see. Search drop down changes - Probably would have to be re-tested as a few minor boards versions have been released, and I know they keep messing with search. I haven't looked at this. Generally, we've been considering replacing the main search with a plugin that uses google instead. Mainly because the boards software's search facility is problematic in a number of way - not least that it's limited to a 4 year index and even that performs poorly. As a result, we're not investing much attention in it.

I turned off likes for admin because someone made a shill and was just liking everything I posted as some kind of reverse psychology sarcasm trolling. It didn't seem worth the hassle, so I just turned off admin likes.

I answered it because when we make a change that could possibly block people from using the boards, we treat that as higher priority and of general interest. Similar to how, when we migrated to the new boards software we allow commentary anywhere and everywhere, and tried to monitor and respond to issues however we could. Less urgent issues, even if repeatedly pushed by a single user, don't merit the same treatment. For example, these issues have different priority: A security change we made that could be preventing users from accessing the boards at all, or repeatedly challenging large numbers of users with captcha A single user asking for a higher limit on daily likes for a second time after the total was previously raised in response to the same request

This is some added security we put on the site both to stop hack attacks if they are occurring, but also more specifically to cut down on the guest traffic from bots that was eating site resources for no reason. This has significantly cut down on bot/spider traffic on the web site so it's achieving its goal. We've dropped about 27% of the bot-driven guest users on the site on our 2 day average. That's good news for performance of the site for real users. There might be some legit activities though, that are getting swept up in the process. That's why we have it set to challenge a user with captcha as opposed to just blocking them. Since that appears to be the case, I just made two tweaks - I upped the allowed time on the site after solving a captcha to 1 hour, and I turned the security level down a bit to avoid catching real users at all. Ideally we will identify the specific firewall rules that are catching legit site activity and adjust them or turn them off, so we don't have to just generically lower the security level. But we'll refine that over time. For now, please let me know if this continues to happen frequently given the adjustments I just made. Thanks!

Maybe a community maintained list... If you buy a book indicating it's a grail / collection piece, and then flip it within X time, you go on the list as a flipper -- not inherently a bad thing, but good information that might go into pricing...?

Oh man... does a market-place specific thread qualify for my official "the end is coming/here" post? I think I need a ruling... who mods the mods? I might be busted for being off topic...

Less scrolling to get to new posts has been a hot button issue for quite a while and has been often requested in the past. This was an easy change. Easy to do, easy to test, easy to put back. Doing experiments on board organization is how we improve things. I took actions based on my judgement, and limited feedback. When people don't respond much one way or the other after a couple of weeks, we have a few choices: Leave the feedback thread up for a while longer Forget the change Make the change and see how it works out Which we choose to do depends on how sensible the change seems, and how risky it seems to try it. In this case, it makes good sense, opens up room to highlight other threads without stickying crazy numbers of threads to the top, and is easy to undo. In the meantime, performance is a different scale of issue that isn't comparable in terms who or what it takes to address. It's a little like saying we should stop brushing our teeth until we get our clogged arteries fixed. Yes, the clogged arteries are a priority, but we should still practice good hygiene since it doesn't impact how we fix the clogged arteries one way or the other. Performance is being addressed, but it's entangled with some of the rest of the technical infrastructure. The board software vendor wants us to arrange things in ways that are convenient for them, but worse in a number of ways (SEO, international performance, etc.). We're seeking better solutions, but that will take some time to work through. By the way, I'm likely to remove a bunch of these posts after this change as settled out, as we're WAY off topic for the thread, Marwood. Please try not to bundle off-topic questions into stickied threads with a particular purpose.

The point would be to unsticky a number of those threads and take up less front page real-estate. What usually happens in these situations, though, is that if I make a post like this, solicit feedback, wait a few days and just do it --- it turns out that a bunch of people didn't read the thread and feel that they didn't have a chance to speak up. So often I will let some solutions co-exist to see how the community reacts over a longer period of time. If the feedback is clear and one-sided, I'll make the change quickly. If it's sparse and/or controversial, I'll leave it a while to see how things play out.

Hi all, I thought it would be cool to make a single thread as an index of all of the ongoing contribute-forever kind of threads FROM COMICS GENERAL ONLY so people could find those cool gems. Some of them are pinned to the top, but definitely not all - there wouldn't be room! I'm thinking that each forum could have a thread like this that gets pinned, and that might save some room at the top, while making space for more cool threads like these to be featured. HERE IS HOW IT WORKS: I added a tag to the threads listed below of "infinite". Because of that you can find the whole list of them AND click on the black dot to see new posts via this search: THE INFINITE THREADS LIST! Here are the first few that I tagged, but anyone who adds an "infinite" tag to a thread will show up in the search, so the community can add to it. This lets people easily find those threads without always having to scroll past them at the top.

@ditko67, read this post and follow the instructions:.

Well, maybe... but everyone here was once not here, and then they were new. This process could help grow the community. Yes, an influx of new members always means sorting out the reliable from the unreliable, but I wouldn't say that's a bad thing. If a particular seller doesn't like the take a risk on new members, they could always just choose not to work with them until they have an established kudos thread?

Hi all, Please check out this feedback post for a possible rules clarification for the marketplace. Thanks!

Hi all, This came up on a recently moderated post, and I wanted to get some feedback from the membership on this. The Background: When we first offered a marketplace on the boards, people loved it because it was used as a way for community members who trust each other and trust each other's grading to buy and sell books with each other. Often those posts were even board-specific offers, meaning that because of the trust, the community, and the low hassle process the books were offered at a better price than elsewhere. As the marketplace became more popular, people started advertising their eBay sales on the boards. This was a good idea, but it created a kind of annoying situation where people were just looking through the same books they just finished reviewing on eBay, but on the boards. That was when we decided to implement the boards-only rule. It helps the community stay focused on selling to each other, and prevents the double-review issue above. The Situation: Someone posts a selling thread on the boards, and then cross-posts that thread to other social media (facebook, instagram, whatever) -- maybe even specifying that you must be contact the seller through the boards to buy the book, requiring the buyer be a board member. The Question: Does the above situation stay true to the spirit of boards-only offers? Even if it CAN be true to the spirit, if we allow this, does it become a problem if abused? I think that when posted to social media like Instagram, it's not quite the same as a true selling offer like eBay. It's also less likely that people are reviewing Instagram for books to purchase, and more likely that people will be encouraging new members to sign up to the boards from their social network. Possible Results: We will choose to either add an amendment to the rules to allow this kind of thing (with whatever stipulations), or disallow it based on a combination of admin opinion and your feedback. Thanks! Please feel free to vote AND comment on the reasons for your vote.