maybe near the 'watch this' symbol on the blog titles

cool idea :D
*hates spam*

that's an awesome idea!! i second it!

also, I think this would be a great place to post insults to all the spammers out there

FUCK YOU SPAM!

that would be awesome. the spam has been getting really annoying

BOO! SPAM!

good idea.
It is getting worse so

BOOOOOOOOO to SPAM.

yeah it'd be cool if once you've flagged them as spam they dont show up in the blog pages too, kind of like with the only watched, only participated filters

yeah, that sounds good. Also "flag account as spam" maybe.
Threadless could make a spamkillbot that acts upon parameters like the amounts op people flagging it as spam, account date, posts per minute, avatarlessness and other sure-tale-tell spamm signs

you know, I guess this is the wrong place to write about this but I've been thinking on the subject of flagging - wouldn't it be cool to catch out those bastards who purposefully vote great pieces down? There's gotta be hordes of them, because I see amazingly well executed pieces every day that end up with a score beneath three. Meaning that for every person who voted 4 or 5, there was some jealous little creep that gave it a 1 or 0.

We should have some trap-pieces introduced - awesome work from acknowledged designers that would not really be in the running, but just there for the purpose of catching people out. So if you voted 0 on that piece, you'd be, like, banned from scoring designs for a month. Three strikes and you'd be kicked out of the scoring loop for good.

I just hate seeing great pieces do poorly.

two very awesome suggestions, "flag account as spam" would be great.

and I agree with maybe catching out people who vote subs down. I'm pretty sure there are a couple I've seen with 1000s of 'submissions voted on' with an average score 0f 0.17 or something. it would be nice to see those kind of people banned. It's just not nice knowing those kind of idiots are around

omg average score of 0.17??? they really should be kicked out.

the problem with 'flag account as spam' is that the mods would have to do a lot of work to make sure regular accounts aren't being killed off by overzealous spamkillbots :/

yeah thats be true, there'd always be jealous/stupid people who mark regular bloggers like ginetteginette as spammers or something haha

It'd be great, but what if it was just a disgruntled blogger who was upset about a post, and marked a legitimate blog as spam?
Just something to think about.

I could see something like this getting abused.

yeah I dont think itd work to have it automated, but itd be a great way for the threadstaff to find the spam blogs quicker

Meaning that for every person who voted 4 or 5, there was some jealous little creep that gave it a 1 or 0.

Yeah, that's probably what's happening to my designs...:P

But seriously, I agree with everything that's been said in this blog and I hope it gets the attention of the right people. but apple and chipmunk are right about it being abused--if automated, it would probably need to have a certain # of flags before investigated as spam.

Meaning that for every person who voted 4 or 5, there was some jealous little creep that gave it a 1 or 0.


Or there was some people who didn't think it was the greatest thing ever. How do you tell the difference between people who thought a piece just wasn't their thing and the supposed voting down people?

I zero the designs I hate.
I 5 the designs I love.

I sometimes hate a bit... but my average is 1.75.
This is not downvoting.

Careful with the trapping. You may catch me in that net.

I don't feel the down-vote bait thing. Thing is, down-votes are probably spread out evenly over great subs, and sometimes people genuinely don't like what is considered "great art" by most.

it seems like they're pretty "on top of things"
as i see the spam getting taken care of pretty quickly

don't you?

yeah I don't think anything can be done about the downvoting, its just a fact of life that people will be out there who are dicks and want to vote stuff down to try and give themselves a better chance or something, I don't understand the reasoning behind it. But yeah, that's life.

I just want a way in which I can remove all the spam blogs from my blogpage so they dont clog up everything, kind of similar to the newsfeed on facebook where you can hide posts you dont want to see

and yeah you're right littlem they get on it pretty fast, I just thought it could help them out a bit

if flagging was installed here, most of my blogs would get flagged !

Do they have a system in place that you have to have a waiting period after creating an account before you can post comments? Although there would be obvious downsides in delaying legitimate people's comments on the site, it could force spammers accounts into an incubation period. I assume that spammers setup the account, paste in a couple of pre-made spam blogs and post them, and then forget about the account, so forcing them to wait a day to be able to post on an account would hopefully help deter.

while it's a good idea, i could see it being abused as people like me constantly mark littlem's blogs as spam

or porn

They should make it that if a newly created account posts link in their first blog post, they get banned/flagged for review.

yeah it could quite easily be abused, I guess I have too much faith in the public to use such things for good rather than bad lol

I don't know, I still think there are pieces that just shouldn't be marked as 0, no matter what your personal preference. I can hate a piece to death and it can be really not my cup of tea in execution and theme, but if I can see it's a competent piece with a lot of thought and effort built into it, I won't give it a 0.

Banning people for giving others a zero just doesn't make any sense. If the zero is there, it's going to be clicked by somebody, no matter how good YOU think the design is. You can never speak for every single individual no matter how obvious you might think it is, especially on such a diverse site.

It will also require Threadless to change their Terms of Use or Policy, which every CURRENT and new user has to accept before continuing using the site. It's just not worth the trouble.

And how would you even word that rule? "You will be banned for giving the wrong design a zero. So if you're not sure if you're going to get banned just vote everything above 1 or just don't vote at all. Thanks!" You just can’t put into an equation what type of drawing ALL of the voters should consider to be “good” or deserving of no less than a vote of 3.00.

The current voting system works just fine. Good designs with low scores still get printed. The numbers of votes the designs are getting are lower than ever. They barely reach 1,000, when years ago they used to get 3 to 4,000+ votes. Let’s not decrease the numbers even more. I'm not trying to defend the zero voters, I'm just pointing out the problems this will create.


The only good idea in this blog is having a waiting period for new accounts or not being able to post hyperlinks until a certain age of the account or an e-mail verification, or something like that.

yeah I agree with you green rabbit, I don't think that blocking zero voters would work either, its just something that we can't avoid. I don't know how it got introduced into this blog its not really related to spam haha

I think I would flag everything some people wrote as spam.

Chipmnk on Oct 10 '09 at 11:17am
I could see something like this getting abused.

iPear on Oct 10 '09 at 4:06pm
I think I would flag everything some people wrote as spam.

And it would be impossible to tackle the down-voter issue. I don't even see an issue, though. People vote the way they vote, and you have to consider the amount of designs that aren't that great. And if it's too big of a problem, then that low score will be the new standard, and I assume Threadless knows not to print shitty designs, regardless of its score.

yeah I agree on the downvoting thing. I guess not many people aren't in favour of my original point either =/

time to delete the blog lol

No, you have something there, its just that there's really high chances of it getting abused. I remember in another blog, someone suggested powers earned to long-time users. But I'm pretty sure long-time users would somewhat abuse certain aspects of those powers too. Maybe if the powers were just appointed to abled individuals who sign up for the job.

unfortunately, as I have scored over 20,000 submissions and most of them really stink, my score average is real low. I make an effort to slog through all of them, and I do give high scores when they're deserving. I don't think you can ban people on their average scores they give to designs.

Although this blog has lost its focus, regarding scoring, if you ban accounts that score all 0s then you would have to look at it from the other side and say that you should ban accounts that artificially raise scores by 5ing everything. I'm sure that the powers that be have considered this and that neither one has enough of an effect on scores to be considered necessary to combat.

jill i totally agree, the more designs you vote obviously the lower your average because its a fect there are a hell of alot more bad designs than good ones lol I think the whole idea of banning people based on their averages is a no no

Yes, flagging posts or accounts as spam/spambots is a good idea.

No, flagging accounts that "appear" to be voting low is not a good idea. It could easily be abused, or used to harass people.

AndyDufresne on Oct 10 '09 at 1:57pm
They should make it that if a newly created account posts link in their first blog post, they get banned/flagged for review.

That's a little too automatic and draconian.

I disagree with having any sort of bot that lights people up if they don't have a avatar or post a link or whatever. I just want to see a flag as spam button :( though I guess its not a big problem as threadless seem to get on it quite quickly anyway

On the topic of spam:

flagged for review/banned.

Whoops. *Having a script that reviews account age, then checks first post for a hyperlink, then flags for review/bans

I don't think that'd work, especially when you get every noob to the site posting links to their critiques for the first time

don't worry. I already sent an email to threadless flagging this blog as spam.
you're welcome :)

hahaha

No posts until you add an avatar. BAM! Problem solved.

but some spammers have had avatars lately.