jSnively

http://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/197660/some-slight-changes-to-the-forums#latest

Hello all how about a quick update?

Changes to the Like/Dislike System

We've split the reaction buttons out into Like / Funny / Informative, and made them much more prominent. Hopefully that will encourage more users to engage with the system. Currently an informative post is worth more points than a funny or liked post, though that may change if suddenly everything becomes informative.

We've also removed the 'dislike' button.

There are a number of reasons for this, but it boils down to the fact it wasn't accomplishing what we hoped it would when we implemented it. Users would often just dislike the posts of any user(s) they were engaged in a debate with, or simply disliked. It was also too frequently used to dogpile reasonable posts when they didn't line up with a segment of the forum's point of view, whether that be a reasonable criticism of Apple, or something political in nature. So it has been removed.

Moderation Policy

I also want to take a minute to remind people of the moderation rules here. We try not to moderate too heavily, but personal attacks, racism, homophobic comments, and general bigotry will get moderated out. In addition we're going to start moderating comments that are essentially off-topic, especially when they're early on in the threads. That doesn't mean we will pull the comment outright if it can be salvaged (we just delete them now), but please keep that in mind before posting. One off-topic post early on can really derail the entire thread, and we have different standards for what we want to show on the main site (first 10 or so) than what we would allow deeper on into a thread.

Slight reorganization

We merged the Genius Bar down to a single category. The sub-categories were unnecessary given the amount of use that part of the forums gets. We really like the Genius Bar as a forum though, and we encourage all of you to visit it and help each other out when you can. We may have some cool plans for it in the future...

We also merged mobile Feedback forum back into the general Feedback forum, it had 15 threads, it was unnecessary. 

Misc. Changes

Editors are all now clearly marked as such, so keep an eye out for them on the forums and say hi every now and again and give feedback. Neil, Mikey, Mike, Dan, Roger, Victor, Christine, Ashley, Max, and Kasper all read the comments, even if they don't post too frequently. We wouldn't be where we are without them, and I just want to say thank you to all of them. Hopefully you guys are enjoying the content they are producing.

Also a quick shout out to our head moderator, Marvin for helping to keep things sane around here.

Your ignore list now has a capacity of 50 users.

In Closing...

We want to ensure the forums stay healthy and vibrant for a long time, and 2016 was a good step in that direction (so say the almighty metrics.) AI has been around for 18 years, which is crazy for a website, and we hope to be around for many more.

We will be back sometime next year to talk about more stuff. As always please feel free to leave feedback here and let us know what we can do to make things better. We are not some empty news regurgitating factory, we are here and we are listening.

Happy Holidays!

SpamSandwich said:

Have you considered changing ad networks? I notice many sites are wittingly or unwittingly pushing takeover ads which highjack mobile browsers and send you straight into some app on iTunes.

 This is something we are looking at, yes.

crowley said:

The cynic in me thinks that this might be a clever way to get your forum members to click on ads and earn you a kickback (but nevertheless I'll keep an eye out for bad ads and let you know, it can't be easy to manage this stuff).

Drat! You've uncovered my plot to make literally tens of dollars. The one ad we have on the forums tends to be ok, as do the ones on iphone.appleinsider.com, so mostly expecting reports on the desktop side of things.

Hello All,

I'm here again to talk about ads.

We've had a problem recently with ad networks blatantly disobeying our preferences and injecting auto-playing audio and/or video ads on the site, or ads that cause the site to jump around when they load. We hate this, it's our policy not to ever show any ads that play audio or jump around on the page. As soon as we see them, we ban them, but as it turns out big ad doesn't care about little independent publishers too much. A lot of the problem stems from the fact that 90% of ads don't get tested against Safari since the market share on the internet at large is so low. That's not the case here at AppleInsider though, and it means we bump into way more issues most publications.

That's where you come in. Frankly, we could use your help in identifying any offending ads. A lot of these things get served up based on geographic location, so it's difficult for us to see what you as a group can collectively see. The best way for you to help us is to see what place the ad goes (also known as the landing page) to so we can ban the URL. Any screenshots you want to attach of the offending ads will help as well, so we can figure out what slots are the largest offenders. Not only will this help us ban the ads as they come up, but it also helps us build a history of the problem which we can then present to our ad partners to show them that something is very wrong on their end.

Anyone who posts in this thread to help identify an ad will receive a special forum badge (TDB), as well as a heap of points. I know it's not much, but hopefully it can help spur some of you into helping us squash these rogue ads.

Thanks for helping, and as always thanks for continuing to read AppleInsider.