/meta/ - site discussion

This thread is for discussing the results of the Jan 22 - Feb 5 Hellweek of 2024.

It was requested in the original Hellweek thread that we provide some statistics, so we've spent some time putting together a spreadsheet with some stats which you can access here! Please note that the spreadsheet has 2 pages which you can switch using the tabs at the bottom. The first page is statistics about users, and the second page is statistics specifically about moderation.

For those who don't have the time to read that, here is a brief overview (the spreadsheet has more detailed information):
>Total posts
27775
>Total reports
3165
>Unique posting IPs
8005
>Unique posting devices
5681
>% of posts that are by VPN users
13.4%
>Total bans
1248
>Total permanent bans
188
>Top 3 most common ban reasons
Derailing, infighting and lack of sage
>Top 3 most banned threads
The Celebricows thread, the Shayna/Dolly Mattel thread, and the Twitter/Tumblr Fandom Discourse Thread

A surprise month of Hellmas is now in effect. For the rest of the month of December, VPN posting will be banned and moderation will be stricter. 

The only exception to the VPN posting ban is the gender critical hidden board as we want the women posting there to be able to encrypt their traffic if they are living in a location where it may not be safe to post their opinions otherwise. 

Please note that the VPN detection API we use is about 95-98% accurate. This means that a small percentage of IPs may be incorrectly blocked or allowed through. If you are not using a VPN and your IP address is blocked, please email us at admin@lolcow.farm and we will submit a correction for your IP to the API provider and add an exception for the time being.

Why are we doing this?
There has been an uptick in the amount of baitposting and infighting in the past few months, and it has gotten much worse in the last few weeks. The use of VPNs for ban evading has made it more difficult to stamp this out.

We would like to address one type of posting in particular: infight baiting. If you are making a post, whether it's your honestly held opinion or not, and any regular user of the site should be fully aware that it is going to cause an infight, you will be banned. Some examples of this:

Can’t people with dynamic IPs still ban evade?
Yes they can, but we can put range bans in place that will limit their ability to do so. 

Will this change become permanent?
That is not our intention at this time, but if the userbase is strongly in favour of it, we may consider it.

This thread is for discussing the incident/downtime. Please take general complaints to the appropriate thread, they will not get any responses here.

The site is back online, and we expect there to be no further downtime as a result of this incident. We apologise for how long the downtime was, and we are glad to be back!

A full explanation is written below, but there is a tl;dr at the end for those who are not interested in the details.