Vandals. Again!

Pling
1

I wrote you about this before, here To the opendesktop.org site admins: Trolls and Abusers , and asked you to DISABLE NEGATIVE VOTING because there’s NO OTHER WAY to prevent vandals from sabotaging themes (especially the highest ranked ones). You didn’t listen (well, except for that pitiful attempt to allow only “supporters” to vote), and now i just got hit again, together with 4 other top themes, by this vandal ‘bascha’ who just logged on yesterday after 6 months of absence for a new round of banging, here: https://www.opendesktop.org/member/362438/

  1. please revert this guy’s negative votes, ALL of them, not just the ones from yesterday (his behavior is obvious)
  2. delete his account
  3. DISABLE NEGATIVE VOTING!!!

My theme ‘Xfce Evolution’ is #3 in top gtk3 themes (was 81%, dropt to 79% after this vandalism), here https://www.xfce-look.org/browse/cat/135/ord/top/ , and this is my last warning to you, if you do not disable negative voting i’m deleting my account, i’ll move my theme somewhere else, i’ll redd about this, mail about this to top tech sites, you name it, and i’ll do whatever i can to bring all top themers switch away from opendesktop, your lack of/inappropriate reaction w/r to this sort of vandalism is OUTRAGEOUS for us theme creators, i’m not gonna take a single act of vandalism anymore.

PS
Just to make myself as clear as i can:

  1. negative voting is an invitation to abuse, explain to us (you NEVER did) what are, in your view, the benefits of a ‘-’ button IN COMPARISON to the costs associated with its abusive use
  2. you can introduce the option of removing a previous positive vote that a user has given (“unlike”), but negative voting should be absolute exceptions and should be reserved for signaling abuses, and for this your users have the [moderated] “report” link, no need for an un-moderated ‘-’ button
  3. facebook is a living example of a positive voting-only ranking system (with vote removal option, “unlike”), and IT WORKS
1 Like
2

Hi gyll,

thanks for your report, there obviously looks like something seems contradictory in the comments and voting.
Now just like on almost all other platforms like reddit, disqus, or star-systems driven platforms like amazon or google playstore which have 1 - 5 stars instead of only 5 stars, etc. voting up AND down is a valuable feature.
Of course any rating system, even with only positive votings can be abused, so removing one option or only offer 5 star ratings isn’t a solution.
We certainly look into suspicious votings, but as with everywhere else like reddit & co., it is not obvious if someone’s expressed liking or disliking is genuine or not.
Espcially in an open and free portal your third point is like preventing any negative expression or review of e.g. games, movies, etc. would likelya be viewed to go against the spirit of freedom of speech, so we are not wanting to go down that route.

We have to look into cautious ways to deal with this and if you feel something is wrong, like in that given case, we certainly look into it and try to solve it.

We value any contribution, and understand abusive behaviour is never pleasant, so we hope you stay with us and not throw in the towel because of a few bad actors, which if possible we will help try to identify and mitigate the effect.

3

No, please stop this pointless line of argument (reddit does it, etc), explain where the value of a ‘-’ is for as long as you have a “report” button (see the edit that i just made to my post above).

No matter how much i try looking into it, i can see ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE for an UN-MODERATED ‘-’ button, at least on a site like this. There MAY be some value for a ‘-’ where the sheer number of potential negative votes/day is so large that votes cannot be moderated, but NOT ON THIS WEBSITE. People put too much effort into their work and they have better things to do than policing their work, reporting abusers, and accumulating tons of frustration with vandals.

Removing the ‘-’ button, together with providing a vote removal (“unlike”) option is THE ONLY way forward.

I’m fed up with this, either remove that un-moderated ‘-’ button or i’m out, the frustration i get far outweighs the benefits of having my theme posted here.

PS
My previous report (To the opendesktop.org site admins: Trolls and Abusers) about another vandal ‘xfcegure’ (https://www.opendesktop.org/member/358373/) was left with no reaction on your behalf, his negative vote remained both on my theme and on all the other themes he decided to bang that day, and his account has not been deleted to this day, so much for your taking care of these morons.

PPS
You remark w/r to this ‘bascha’ moron’s voting being inconsistent with his comments is also irrelevant, people like him may well decide to upvote the lowest-ranked and/or unmaintained/obsoleted themes while downvoting the highest-ranked themes just to create the illusion of a legitimate vote, etc.
Again, removing the un-moderated downvoting (’-’) option is the only way i can think of for keeping these morons at bay, i just can’t see any other way (well, except maybe for an elaborate scheme wherein the votes themselves have a rank/value based on the other votes, e.g. a negative vote will have little to no value if the overall negative votes count for only a small fraction of the total number of votes, etc - but even such an approach is subtly tricky).

PPS2
Your remark/claim about “freedom of speech” is also invalid. So let’s just give the green light to nazi parties in Germany, to the N-word in the US, and all of that, right? What people like the ones i reported do have nada to do with “freedom of speech”, it’s plain moronic attitude and more like “hate speech” than anything else.

4

Also I experienced this issue also lately: monkeydoo: https://www.opendesktop.org/member/509446/ and uppyge: https://www.opendesktop.org/member/507421/ , both commented with nice and fine but voted bad instead. fake votes? maybe? wo knows… ? I don’t really care and you shouldn’t either

I think opendesktop has almost equal positive and negative fake votings so not allowing bad votings would completly destroy the balance here. A much better way would be to completly kill the voting system and use download per day based statistics as other sites.

5

@sixsixifive: replies like yours make people become misanthropes

why on earth should i even listen to someone telling me what i should and should not do, when i know nothing about that someone, and that someone comes with no supporting arguments whatsoever to their claims? “you should do X, you shouldn’t do Y, i think that X, a better way is Y, etc”. geesh, can you hear yourself? did you ever try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes?

you go: “i think there are almost equal positive and negative fake votings”. first of all, on what ground can you possibly “think” that? plus, in case you didn’t notice, one negative vote counts like some 3 positive votes when your rank is some 80%, it takes one moron to bang three people who say “thank you” (and, given my past experience with the voting scheme, i’m inclined to suspect this gets increasingly worse as the rank goes higher). but heck, you should have spent some time investigating before writing down your “thinking”, which was obviously not something you could be bothered with too much.

and to top it all off, when you finally try coming with an alternative, your “alternative” looks like you’ve spent less time thinking about it than typing it: the only ones rewarded by a downloads-based top will be people who push N releases every day, that’s all you’ll get by that, all you needed to do to find this out was to look at the discrepancy between the already existing downloads-based top and voting-based top.

i’m soooo tried of trying to argue with people who don’t even know what an argument looks like, geesh…

PS
all the questions in this reply are rhetoric (in case you didn’t figure that out), i will not reply to you anymore

6

Thanks for sixsixfives feedback and the suspicious voting links from both of you.
In case of misleading votings we decided to not have them negative effects and removed them on a case by case base.
In case of longer or long-term existing accounts, we will give a longer wait period to respond before deciding to take measurements.
Also as a step to more easily identifiy misleading votes, it is now mandatory to add some text for negative votes, where in case of postive votes a simple “+” as text is sufficient.
This can be increased if needed and also will have a note urging the voter to express the reason for downvoating and how to make things better.

In any case, a voting expression in both directions is common accepted almost everywhere, be it metacritics games or movie critic or music reviews, it is a mixed score of opinions, if you like others opinions or think they are justified or not doesnt matter.
We are certainly all in favor to look into ways to make the voting system more rationale.

7

I think I agree with you. There was a tension between Antu author and La Capitaine author. Today I am discussing with him about the license, but I have noticed his negative ratings and understood what happened because he had conflicts with icons designers who have forked his icon theme. The Antu author used negative rating to revenge on La Capitaine author and to downvote all products of La Capitaine author and also all other people’s products forked from La Capitaine.

It is the hour of putting end to the negative rating because I got an impression that the negative rating also is used for revenge.

8

@gusreis1989 The admins here seem incapable of grasping the simple argument that, for better of worse, PEOPLE PUT EFFORT in what they publish here, so there’s no place for negative voting to stand for “I dislike your work, so i’ll hammer you. Because i can.”, NOT ON A SITE LIKE THIS. The ‘+’ should stand for “Thank you for your work, it’s valuable for me”, and the “report this” button/link should be for “This pitiful sob stole my/somebody’s work (or the likes)”, with the latter being moderated. And that’s that. These guys (the admins), they just don’t get it.

2 Likes
9

Totally agreed. I also got an impression that the negative rating is used for accusing somebody of copying others’ work, since the most of repositories are GPL3-licenced. GPL3 allows to copy. Then the original authors can not sue the forkers. If they do not want their work to be forked, they have to put CC-ND or EULA licence instead of other licences.

“Report” should be replace only for “Report misuse/spam” (without comments, just a list of reasons, like Facebook does). The reports should be analysed only by human administrators and NOT by AI admins. I boycott strongly AI robots because they are irrational unlike us, humans. If you think it is bad idea, what alternative do you think better?

10

EN: Sorry but I need to respond this, I advise that my English level is not the best and I will post on Spanish too.

I’m on opendesktop share my work and I don’t understand gurseis1989. I work on my icons Antu - KDE Store with two licenses (LIMA and CC-BY-NC-ND) licenses that the site allows to use.

Excuse me but I think that what Gurseis1989 is saying is not true. I do not deny that I have given negative to two works that derived from my first theme of icons (antu classic), now the reasons are in an issue of GitHub, but one thing is to give negative feedback and quite another is to make a “persecution” as this character says against all the themes that derive from my work. It seems to me that the gentleman has a confusion between the works and assumes that Antu Classic and Antu are the same work, being that they are two completely different ideas, my new subject is created from 0 and I have only used two licenses among them the LIMA and the previously cited (CC-BY-NC-ND) that is in fact within the options to use in OpenDesktop.

Gurseis1989 came due to a comment from another user who did not agree with the use of the license that has my subject, and from there began a series of prosecution both me and my friend Mcder3 (creator of the Hellium and Nilium theme) practically forcing us to use similar licenses.

I will be honest, I am not in favor of the forks, because I do not have good experiences, so in my new job I changed the license, now if it is not allowed inside the site, they should warn, but what this character says is false, and If you do not believe me, check everything about my profile, even if I tried to change something, you would know, please, I just want to share my icons and not continue with this that for me the truth is absurd.

But I think that due to the unjust accusations of this character, he could not not answer. regards

This may clarified my posture (but see is in 2015/2016! please …):

ES: Disculpen pero considero que lo que está diciendo Gurseis1989 es faltar a la verdad. No niego que he dado a negativo a dos trabajos que derivaron de mi primer tema de iconos (antu classic), ahora las razones están en un issue de GitHub, pero una cosa es dar voto negativo y otra muy distinta es hacer una “persecución” como dice este personaje contra todos los temas que derivan de mi trabajo. Me parece que el señor tiene una confusión entre las obras y asume que Antu Classic y Antu son el mismo trabajo, siendo que son dos ideas completamente distintas, mi nuevo tema está creado desde 0 y solo he utllizado dos licencias entre ellas la LIMA y la anteriormente citada (CC-BY-NC-ND) que de hecho está dentro de las opciones para utilizar en OpenDesktop.

Gurseis1989 llegó debido a un comentario de otro usuario que no estaba de acuerdo con el uso de la licencia que tiene mi tema, y desde ahí comenzó una serie de enjuiciamiento tanto a mi como a mi amigo Mcder3 (creador del tema Hellium y Nilium) prácticamente obligándonos a que usáramos licencias similares.

Seré sincero, no estoy a favor de los forks, porque no tengo buenas experiencias, por eso en mi nuevo trabajo cambié de licencia, ahora si no está permitida dentro del sitio, pues deberían avisar, pero lo que dice este personaje es falso, y si no me creen a mi, revisen todo sobre mi perfil, incluso si intentara cambiar algo, ustedes sabrían, por favor, yo solo quiero compartir mis iconos y no seguir con esto que para mi es absurdo la verdad.

Pero creo que debido a las acusaciones injustas de este personaje, no podía no responder. Saludos

12

@fabian_alexis:
cc-nd and cc-nc really do not allow modifications and collaboaration, so we might not further offer them in the future.

As for the downvotes, we are open to any feedback and suggestions and think about it in context of examples and ongoing.
Since upvotes are subject to fake votes as easily, we might find a score system that factors in downloads, votes, plings and activity to give a better overall score / ranking than just votes.
Since this is an evolving process, and no one has found perfect solutions also on other platforms, we are open to make changes and adapt the mechanisms.

13

@opendesktop:
Before we had jobs on BSD license that have now gone, imagine when they only leave free licenses… you can keep open, semi-open or even closed licenses, the problem here is the money that many want to get with the work of third parties.

With respect to the voting system. It should be like stars (from 1 to 5) instead of generating positive or negative percentage.

I have been in opendesktop for more than 10 years and we never had these problems until the plings plan was started…

1 Like
14

@opendesktop Okay, your didn’t move a finger to do something about these abusers, so i deleted my theme. Now how to i delete my account?

15

Deleted as per request.
Thanks for being part of opendesktop.org, helping advance technological freedom and liberty.

16

The “Report comment” seems to be broken so just wanted to give a heads up on this user.
https://www.opendesktop.org/u/milinsisy/

One thing Google+ got right is the ability to delete a comment and all others made by the same user.

Cheers!

17

We have a similar functionality, as you can see the spammer got removed with all of its comments.
We are a small team constantly working on improving opendesktop.org, so thanks for any feedback and helping to make this site better.

1 Like
18

Thanks, was hoping you’d take care of it.

My comment about G+ was about the ability to handle it without intervention from admin.

But am glad that there was action and a response. :+1: