this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
22 points (84.4% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
1131 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The point of blocking is to cause things to be invisible to the default view.
If the blocked material is put in users' face so they know it's blocked, that misses the point of blocking it.
Mod logs and published block lists are a great way of allowing users who are concerned about overblocking to investigate ... without failing at the whole endeavor by sending every user a copy of all the horse porn & Nazi spam that got blocked.
When I ran spam filtering for an institutional email server about 20 years ago, I made the "mod logs" (or rather, SMTP envelope data of blocked messages) available to users; but they had to go to a web page to see what messages had been blocked; and the content was not visible (since the mail server had never accepted it). I wrote that code so that my users could tell me if the spam blocking I'd configured was mistakenly blocking mail they wanted to receive.
(The users were scientists & engineers. They could read email headers. If they wanted to.)
But the point of blocking the horse porn spam and Nazi froth is lost if the users have to see it anyway so they know it's blocked.
Horse porn is not a made-up example, by the way. There was an email spammer named Jeremy Jaynes, who was in the habit of sending spam promoting bestiality porn. When he was arrested, suddenly the users on the email server I was running stopped complaining to me about horse porn.