Mageia forum

So, there is a troll on the boards. Going everywhere, posting all kinds of gibberish. Impersonating other people.

And the mods appear to be tolerating it.

For a short time, I was amused. I am no longer amused. In fact, I am seriously annoyed.

Someone email me when this kook is finally eliminated. Until then, this board is just too big a pain in the ass to bother visiting.

Hi jiml8,

it should have stopped, now, since some hours.

forums team has spent hours today on improving things

It's under control now.

however, if there are old posts that you find particularly annoying, please remind the moderators

Forum notice: Topic moved to Wizard's lair

Finally we get peace in this Mageia world.

Well, I suppose he probably was technically sophisticated in how he attacked the site. I know that if I were inclined to behave that way, you would have one hell of a time stopping me. So, that he was around for several days is not a big deal.

What I fail to understand, though, is why the mods engaged him directly, and why so many of his posts are still here. I am particularly flummoxed by the fact that a thread started by "doktor50000" is now a sticky.

That you did not just remove his posts as they appeared suggests that something else was going on...something behind the scenes that you are not revealing. Perhaps he was a present (or past) member of the team and had more access than you realized?

My patience ended when I saw that idiocy appear on the thread I started to inform about the recent privilege escalation vulnerability...and saw mods engaging him yet again.

But if the problem is finally solved, then that is a good thing. Now, you need to get rid of all those posts.

Hi,

Removing all the posts would need us to remove also answers of other users and spend a lot of time so that threads make sense after cleaning.
And removing posts is not something we do happily.

So we removed the worst part = 80% of the bad content with 20% of effort.... the rest 20% of posts would need 4x more time to clean properly.
So if in a topic you find something that really annoy you please report it and we'll do our best to clean the annoying part.

And if you can live with that we can also

Thanks for your understanding.

In some cases, entire threads can be removed.

I don't care about my replies getting lost, if a thread gives an unpleasant feeling and does not at all reflect the constructive spirit the Mageia community is striving to (and often succeeds to) have.

+1 for removing entire threads created by this person - the only comment from them that would be worth keeping IMO is the part about *mageia.org still running Mageia 1, which is actually true (it does not mean however that it's a huge security can of worms, and this user clearly did not hack us - our sysadmins kind of made of this Mageia 1 a custom LTS by backporting important fixes and making sure to workaround vulnerabilities when they could. But upgrading is of course of the agenda!).

I wouldn't mind losing my answers to a trollish topic personally

Moderators cannot remove troll threads without strong demand from you all (especially from those who posted in the threads), because that would be censoring.

So please, all, confirm when you agree with removing them

Akien wrote:.
I wouldn't mind losing my answers to a trollish topic personally

Neither me but i don't think it's not worth of it to use too many hours to do it.

jiml8 wrote:My patience ended when I saw that idiocy appear on the thread I started to inform about the recent privilege escalation vulnerability...and saw mods engaging him yet again.
But if the problem is finally solved, then that is a good thing. Now, you need to get rid of all those posts.

Would this break Code of Conduct solving somebody idiocy as i got from warning in private message calling mo... that spammer.
https://www.mageia.org/en/about/code-of-conduct/

ozky wrote:

jiml8 wrote:My patience ended when I saw that idiocy appear on the thread I started to inform about the recent privilege escalation vulnerability...and saw mods engaging him yet again.
But if the problem is finally solved, then that is a good thing. Now, you need to get rid of all those posts.

Would this break Code of Conduct solving somebody idiocy as i got from warning in private message calling mo... that spammer.
https://www.mageia.org/en/about/code-of-conduct/

Sometimes it depends on your environment. Many Dutch persons I know think it is very wrong to label a person as stupid, but fine to label an action as stupid.
However, some French people I know think labelling an action as stupid, is as offending as labelling a person.

"Idiocy" is about the words that were written, about the action in the threads... Where I live it is OK to do that, as long as you don't say the poster is an idiot.

So whether a moderator will think jiml8 didn't comply with the code of conduct, depends on what's accepted by his friends and/or in his job and/or family

jiml8 wrote:What I fail to understand, though, is why the mods engaged him directly, and why so many of his posts are still here. I am particularly flummoxed by the fact that a thread started by "doktor50000" is now a sticky.

That you did not just remove his posts as they appeared suggests that something else was going on...something behind the scenes that you are not revealing. Perhaps he was a present (or past) member of the team and had more access than you realized?

Silently removing users posts is the same as censoring. And as he started to create new accounts as he was banned,
we decided to wait and ignore him so maybe he would come to his sane mind again ... seems not.
We were also missing some moderation tools, just yesterday several new special groups were added and also newly registered users posts need to be approved first.

FWIW I've made the thread a sticky after my "evil twin" edited the initial post into an apology to the moderators, with a warning to not feed the troll.

And nope, apart from the moderation team discussing in private what to do nothing happened behind the scenes. No, he never has been a team member
and there's no affiliation with Mageia. You can see the history of the forums team here if you want: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Forums_team

doktor5000 wrote:Silently removing users posts is the same as censoring.

Could we then at least rename the problematic topics, and add a moderator disclaimer on top of them to say that what follows is not to be taken seriously, but is kept for the sake of not censoring users, however troublesome they might be?

Apart from the business plan thread that started all this, and the posts in viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10642 I've moved all of them to our internal moderation trashbin forum. They're not gone, but out sight for normal users.
FWIW, in his last post before that our "friend" mentioned that he's now gone for good.

Nice clean up guys, calm is restored

Is the acc locked too?

doktor5000 wrote:I've moved all of them to our internal moderation trashbin forum. .

Good job nice thanks,can you press button empty trashbin too ?.

I was very annoyed too. Thank you for efforts. Do you think to take a legal action for this particular spammer? I don't know the laws of the country this forum is hosted on (France or Germany?) but if i remember right, EU countries have laws against behaviours like these. Did you find his/hers IP adress?

tarakbumba wrote:Do you think to take a legal action for this particular spammer?
Did you find his/hers IP adress?

He used tor. So no.
I would leave it as is. For me it was enough about that.

To my experience he'll get what he's searching eventually .

I am cool with removing any thread that this person substantially dominated. His contributions were completely without merit.

I think it would be appropriate to truncate the thread I started about the privilege escalation exploit from where he posted, retaining only the final post (which was made by Doktor).

jiml8 wrote:I think it would be appropriate to truncate the thread I started about the privilege escalation exploit from where he posted, retaining only the final post (which was made by Doktor).

Truncating it is fine with me - i don't care about my posts in it getting lost - but having a final post replying to a post that no longer exists looks weird.

jiml8 wrote:I think it would be appropriate to truncate the thread I started about the privilege escalation exploit from where he posted, retaining only the final post (which was made by Doktor).

Moved the irrelevant posts away.

pete910 wrote:Is the acc locked too?

No, but put under moderation, meaning any post needs to be approved before any normal users sees it.
In his last post our "friend" mentioned he's gone for good now.