Comment by eogas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eogas | Hacker News Reader

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That first one was submitted to /r/programming by a user who has a really bad history of incessantly spamming his/her own blog and nothing else. The user has 2 comments in 4 years, and only 2 submissions which are not self promotion (one of which is yours).

I couldn't find a trace of the other two, though looking at your account (or what I think is your account) I am seeing a slew of filtered posts, some of which are on topic, some of which are not. I just approved a couple of your most recent on-topic posts, however I can tell you that you will need to keep a good ratio between your own site(s) and other good content for the spam filter to go easy on you. It filters really heavily against people who submit the same domain a large part of the time, and we (moderators) tend to stick to that as well.

I will comment on your other points in a little while.

EDIT: Okay, now for the rest.

I think the warm fuzzy memories you have of proggit are akin to the warm fuzzy memories a lot of people have of reddit as a whole 3 or 4 years ago. But with a larger userbase comes a lot of noise and idiocy. In my opinion, /r/programming was one of the first subreddits to take real action against quality decay. There was a period of time, after the heyday, but while /r/programming was still a default, when rage comics and advice animals were rampant. Maybe not quite as rampant as the rest of the site, but it was pretty bad. There were lots of people who were not programmers submitting and commenting, so lots of stuff ended up being off topic.

I think the quality has improved immensely since then, and I think this is in part due to strict moderation and the disabling of self posts. I will allow that it certainly isn't as great as reddit as a whole was in its heyday, but it's getting better.

There's not much we can do about the comments. We can't moderate comments for stupidity (because that would be pretty messed up). The only thing I've ever moderated comments for is spam and personal info.

A reboot, unless it's in the form of a different sub, is probably not going to happen, but I'd certainly be interested in hearing any ideas for improving the subreddit in its current form.

Thanks

I've tried to put moreSQL through again - is it on topic for proggit?

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/qklxn/google_mo...

I don't like the idea of having to scrape HN to find other people's content so I can hide my own content submissions in the noise.

I just approved that post. It should be fine.

And on your second note, the idea is not that you go seeking out content to mix in with your own. If you happen to come across a cool article, and it hasn't been submitted to proggit yet, just contribute it. This is probably part of the community vs content aspect you mentioned in a different comment, but sheer size of the site means that you cannot really ignore the community aspect.

I could probably get in trouble for saying this, but the reddit userbase, as a whole, is not smart enough to filter out what is good and bad. If a bunch of bloggers just auto submit every blog article they write, we will have tons of crappy, ad-ridden, off-topic posts being voted to the top. It still happens from time to time. HN might be smart enough to distinguish the good from the bad, but reddit surely is not. So we have to be at least a little restrictive.

I'm not saying your content falls into those categories, but we can't really give special treatment to people we like or are familiar with. There is one guy in the /r/programming approved submitters list, and he is a very noteworthy programmer who, for whatever reason, could not get any of his posts through the spam filter. He is the one exception. For the most part, everyone is lumped into the same bucket.

So when your posts get caught in the spam filter, just send us modmail. Sometimes we'll get them, sometimes we won't. That's just how it is. I saw earlier that you said you sometimes delete them if they've been filtered. This may be a bad idea. I cannot say for sure, because the admins don't really disclose this stuff, but deleting and resubmitting the same link has been known to hurt a user's standing with the spam filter, so just deleting it may do the same thing, I'm not sure. And there's really no reason to delete it. The only think it will clutter up is the spam filter, which is going to be cluttered no matter what.

Anyway, I hope this has been somewhat useful to you. Sorry about the massive walls of text. Let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

So I can infer the rules better, which of my posts are appropriate for proggit and which are not?

lets try and train the bayesian filter in my brain ;)

Haha. Well, to be completely honest, I was recruited as a moderator for /r/programming because of a novelty account I ran that essentially bitched about any submission that could remotely be construed as not being related to programming, so I, and the mod who added me, are pretty strict about what belongs in the sub and what doesn't.

Looking over your blog though, it seems like most of the stuff you write about is fine. We'll only have a huge problem with it if you start indiscriminately submitting every post on your blog, relevant to programming or not. If you're not sure, just submit anyway. One of the admins just added a feature yesterday that allows us to remove posts that are off topic without training the spam filter (long overdue), so if we do decide that something isn't right for the subreddit, it won't harm your standing with the filter.

> It filters really heavily against people who submit the same domain a large part of the time, and we (moderators) tend to stick to that as well.

Is that done on a per-subreddit basis, or a whole-site basis? If I submit mostly my own content to proggit but mostly other people's content to other subreddits, will the proggit filter hate me?

I believe that all the spam prevention measures are done on a per-subreddit basis, meaning that if you only submit to other subreddits, you will look like a new user to the proggit spam filter once you start submitting. A couple users have been plagued by the exact scenario you pointed out, where they had a ton of other sources, but they only posted their own content to /r/programming, which is problematic.

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