Can we please black list itsfoss.com?
7 votes c/freepost Posted by Peter Panski — 7 votes, 8 commentsSource

Maybe a vote or something? How is black listing handled here?

Censoring shouldnt be forced. But give us the option to block the posts of certain users.

A problem at the moment is that a downvoted post doesn’t move very far down the Hot page if people comment on it. Perhaps there needs to be a way to signal that a post is “irrelevant or of very low quality” which would be handled differently by the ranking algorithm. There could be a procedure something like:-

  • click “flag”
  • select a reason for the flag from the following options:-
    • irrelevant: unfree software
    • very low quality

Flagged posts could then be automatically downvoted into oblivion if it was flagged for the same reason by a majority.

I kind of feel a “ban on repeated offenses” is a better way of handling this because my impression is that those guys don’t give a s*** about downvotes or flags, they’re only here for the ads money. So they will keep posting regardless of any votes or flags. I personally wouldn’t mind a complete ban of their website, but whatever…

The difficulty with a ban on repeated offences is that it provides the offender with an incentive to have multiple user accounts and the enforcement of the ban becomes a tedious game of whack-a-mole. Much better to make it easier for members to recognise the offenders and ignore/downvote (or flag) their posts.

It’s worth considering a complete ban of websites which are pure garbage, but who should decide whether a website should be included in that set? And how to detect abuse of the decision process?

With a down vote of -8 it should not appear on the Hot feed no matter how many comments. People can still discuss there. With a higher down vote (like 12?) it should even disappear from the New feed. People would still want to discover posts like that. That’s why I would like to have a latest comments feed.

Oh that’s interesting. I haven’t looked at the code, but this clearly isn’t working: “Sad News! Development Stopped for Korora and BackSlash Linux” is currently ranked 12th hottest post and 12th newest post, but it has 16 downvotes.

edit: oh, perhaps you meant that this is how it should work, not that this is how it does work.

Unless there is a really really strong reason for this, I’m not keen on blocking an entire domain. itsfoss.com is not a “content farm” and is not spam, despite the objectively low quality. I think the problem here is that

  • most of their articles are not interesting to me/us here, as they are very low quality more often than not
  • they seem to post quite a lot of stuff about proprietary software which we are not interested in (I think I’m speaking for everyone here)
  • they repeatedly ignore any comments and requests to not post those articles here

A per-user black list would be an interesting feature, but it’s not implemented (yet?). What I can do immediately is disable their accounts. Let’s see how it goes.

Personally, I’d rather stick with downvotes on an article than censoring by domain.