Has OGS lost its mods?

I have still-pending reports, from 14 days ago, 22 days ago, and a month ago.

I note that a lack of mods would also explain the
sudden rollout of the 3-passes Server Decision option.

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It hasn’t lost them, but rather than “keeping doing the same thing, that can’t keep pace with growth”, OGS is looking at better scalable solutions to make the moderation load more tractable.

(I know this because I’m madly coding some of the stuff you’ll hopefully feel making a positive difference before too long).

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Easy idea to reduce moderator workload: scrap the idea (as instructed in a recent thread) that if your opponent resigns because life intervenes that you should report the game for a moderator to annul it. Do nothing, life/server/rating-system goes on fine without that.

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While I tend to agree I severly doubt this comes up with a frequency that would make it relevant.

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Future:
GPT-5 will work with human users instead of moderators.
Moderators will look only at “bot is wrong” reports

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Don’t forget that we already have a robotic moderator. It’s even running on green (or is it black???) energy. :wink:

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Ok, I’ll broaden the scope to mods should be annulling games much less in general, e.g. because you mismarked stones in scoring so the wrong player won. Oh dear, that happened, learn your lesson, don’t waste a mods time with it. I know others (Gia?) have expressed dissatisfaction with the general tendency of mods being “busybodies” and annulling games which didn’t end as they “should”.

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Are we moderating the mods now?

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The rating system is an estimation methodology that can tolerate a fair amount of noise, and overall probably the vast majority of games that “didn’t end as they should” (for various reasons from score cheating to sand bagging to real-life interruptions, etc.) are never reported and never annulled. The rating system does seem to chug along reasonably fine enough and overcomes such noise eventually.

However, when we do take action, either in annulling games that have already finished or stepping in to help end games in progress, we are almost always acting in response to the report/request of the player affected. Many people don’t seem to like being score cheated or trolled or otherwise griefed, and I think it would leave them severely dissatisfied if nothing is done to help reduce that level of activity or its perceived impact.

It’s one thing if something like this happens as an isolated incident, like when players just simply make mistakes during scoring. However, repeated patterns of intentionally incorrect scoring certainly does happen among trolls that seek only to grief others. It’s not a waste of time for people report issues that they have with their games, since it ultimately helps to identify and reduce trolls, which should help improve the experience for many.

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I watch a lot of games and report major violations, now almost entirely score cheating (due to the implementation of the anti-stalling feature). I currently have four score-cheating reports waiting for action. One has been waiting 19 days and consists of four score-cheated games and four wrongly scored games that may be score cheating or the autoscore bug, all involving one person. Three other score-cheating reports have been waiting 13 days. However, they are actually older. These three cases previously went untouched for 20 days, so I decided that they had probably expired and therefore deleted them and refiled them as the current reports.

(Digressive explanation: reports do expire, I am told by a mod. However, how long a report lives appears to be a secret, and whether an expired report disappears from our report counter or remains in the counter is also mystery.)

Two of those 33-day reports are not trivial, but report manic score cheaters. One guy has a total of 15 stolen games and this is my third report about him (not counting the duplicated report). The other has stolen 11 games and this is my second report on him (not counting the duplicated report).

More than half my score-cheating reports are games in progress. None has been decided in time to save it. This tells me that score-cheating reports are no longer given priority, as they once were.

I don’t believe the “overwhelmed” explanation. When I was moderating, we got about 40 reports a day, and typically had a rolling backlog of about 10 reports. Most of these were handled by five mods with four other mods occasionally handling a report. In late-2021 and 2022, reports were running at about 50 per day, usually with no backlog. Now reports number about 65 per day, with occasional spikes over 100, which I am guessing are due to trolls (many troll reports can be dismissed with a thank you, because they are duplicative and don’t require annulments, as in the case of cancellation trolls).

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FWIW moderators already have ChatGPT based assistance available, though not to the extent that “ChatGPT does moderation instead of moderators”.

I think it was less helpful than we hoped, and there are other approaches more promising, so it’s a bit “on the side” at the moment.

I wonder what explanation you’re referring to? “Overwhelmed” hasn’t been mentioned in this thread.

What I said was that the current model can’t keep pace with growth. That would lead to overwhelmed, for sure.

The current model is hand selecting moderators who have extensive powers, and require a specific set of communication skills, teamwork, tolerance and judgement.

Finding those sort of people is slow, risky, and doesn’t scale. Eventually any given person moves on.

So efforts are focussed on a whole range of different possible approaches that hopefully scale better.

No single “solution” will do everything, but the more different ways we have of “dealing with reports” (including lessening the need for them) the better.

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Need more proompt engineers :laughing:

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Your pretense doesn’t suit you, especially when you contradict yourself in the next line

Ah, so you did know the reference.

Ditching reports via an expiration time will certainly reduce the overload, especially when the time is a big secret. Indeed, you may succeed in discouraging anyone from reporting anything.

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I honestly never expected much of it. :wink: However, there are rare occasions in which ChatGPT produces a message text that I want to use as it is. :wink:

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OGS never lost its mods.
you need a mod pass ticket to get fast track without queueing