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** What to do with suspended contributors who register again? **
We have a problem, which currently mostly affects the Turkish community in Tatoeba. There are a few members who contribute bad sentences, get suspended because they don't improve, create a new account, contribute again bad sentences, get suspended again, and so on.
Some of you may wonder, why are we allowing someone who was suspended to register again? It's not exactly that we allow them. There is no reliable way to identify a person over the Internet, so there is no way for us to know for sure that a new registered member is a previously suspended member.
I have my own ideas of how to change Tatoeba in order to try and deal with this problem, but I would like to hear what the rest of the community has to say. What do you think Tatoeba should do with such members?
Can you check IP numbers? Of course, this is also only a partial solution. Some providers give to clients a new IP number every day ...
We can, but this is not a reliable solution.
In my opinion, there are different solutions:
1) Try to block them through their IPs or something similar (I'm not able to give any advice in particular how it can be done);
2) Block those users as soon as you recognize them with their new accounts and mark red and release all their contribution to let other contributors adopt and correct their sentences, and delete those of them which are insulting or couldn't be understood and corrected.
3) If they only contribute "bad" (grammatically incorrect or unnatural sentences), but not insult nor troll anyone, you can let them contribute "as is", but mark it red, and encourage other contributors check and correct their sentences, and give corpus maintainers and advanced contributors the right to remove red colour from their native-like language sentences.
I think, trolls and vandals are something that any open sourse project have to deal with, it's an inevitable evil, but also it's important to not turn people into vandals with some unfriendly attitude. And it would be helpful also encourage admins and corpus maintainers be more friendly to non-native contributors and help them to make their contribution trustworthed.
I agree. I think that bad contributors whose problem is that they don't understand the purpose and rules of this project can potentially be turned into good contributors if approached in the right way, preferably by someone with a shared native language so there will be no communication issues.
as for trolls, brauchinet's suggestion might actually be something worth trying. :)
Maybe instead of suspending such contibutors they could be redirected to a fake instance of Tatoeba without their knowledge. Dev.tatoeba for deviants. In contrast to the actual dev.Tatoeba, this instance needs to be constantly fed with contributions and comments from the “real” Tateoba, without affecting the dev-contributions. So nobody could be sure which Tatoeba they are actually in. All they would notice is that they are being ignored. Well, not really, other devs can of course translate and comment their entries. Maybe admins can switch to dev.Tatoeba to give some feedback from time to time (** The 2 Ways You Can Be the Most Helpful ** and so on) to make the thing more credible.
I find your suggestion incredibly amusing, this is awesome! xD
Great idea, Brauchinet! :-)
Çok kötü fikir. Herkes yanlış bir siz doğrusunuz değil mi? Onları engelleyerek hakaret ediyorsunuz.
+1
And also, encourage admins, CMs and even ACs to check their sentences on the "fake" (dev.) Tatoeba and **if** they change their behavior, we could "add them back" to the main website. Otherwise, they would log in - and any other account created with the same IP until they change their behavior.
Nice idea, brauchinet, wenn Kafka noch lebte, würde er einen Roman daraus machen, glaube ich. ;-)
(By the way I'm never quite sure, which WORLD I'm actually in.)
al_ex, you could try to log on to the world with a new account (provided they let you create one) and see if it changes - for the better or the worse....
Daha Türkçe bilmeyenler, Türkçe cümlelerine çevirenleri suçluyorlar. Onları haksız yere yargılamayı kesin artık.
As a Turkish speaker, I'm well aware of the problem.
The current methods for suspending accounts and deleting sentences on Tatoeba are not efficient against troll activity. For instance, when an account is suspended, the sentences and comments posted with it still remain. Even if a sentence is deleted, it can still be seen on the logs section of the related account. The suspended accounts still appear on the member list page as well. Hence, suspending an account actually often turns into an intermission. If there were a more aggressive procedure against troll accounts that deleted them as if they never existed, it would be more demotivating than just deactivating them, I believe.
Temporarily blocking the IP address ranges used by the most notorious trolls may also help them give up their obsession, but of course, that would only be a makeshift precaution.
Unfortunately, the Turkish trolls are not the only nor the biggest problem for the Turkish corpus, I think. Along with the bad sentences added by them, there are also too many literal translations, clumsy and less-than-natural sentences in the Turkish corpus, mostly contributed by a quantity-focused CM. It's difficult for a non-native speaker to notice that, though.