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At 3/15/09 05:40 PM, Aci6 wrote: Quick question, say if that happened to me (Writes moderately long reviews, has over 2,000) can I appeal a ban if someone submits a crappy review like that in my account or will I simply be told to change my password?

You can appeal if you want, but it's unlikely that it would be lifted.

Like Mal said in his post, just make sure your account is secure if there's a possibility of people accessing your account and messing about with it. These "someone was using my account" excuses aren't actual excuses in my book; if you aren't securing your account, then you are responsible for whatever happens with it.

At 3/15/09 05:44 PM, NEVR wrote: These "someone was using my account" excuses aren't actual excuses in my book;

They wouldn't account as an 'excuse' if they were true.

if you aren't securing your account, then you are responsible for whatever happens with it.

This is fair enough. Reason why my account password is hard to remember :/

Hi, its me again. Hope you dont mind answering another...

So as you know I have a template I have been following, well I was reading Lizzardis' lesson on reviewing

So like my template, Lizzardismentions saying what you voted... but! If your voting 0-1, and you say in your review that, isnt that against the rules?

"Do not use reviews to express your feelings that the entry should be BLAMMED. If you post "BLAM this" or something similar you will be banned. Use the review option to tell the author how they can improve their work."

Or do you have to use WORDS to get into trouble with it?

I actually also thought about this while reviewing a submission i thought should be blammed, but I was only helpful I didnt say I was voting 0, or that I wanted to blam it. I just wanted to know for future reviews.

I know Lizzardis said the MODs said it was ok, but I dont know if they read it, or if it was over looked.

Thanks again for answering my questions.

Yea, I got a question,

I was banned from writing reviews for A WEEK all because I quoted the blam saying on the audio portal. >_>. I even put QUOTATIONS around it for crying out loud. >_>. This had taken place about mid to late september last year, and I was wondering, when it comes to plagiarism, as long as I give the author or where it came from with the quotes, I'm safe. Yet, when I quoted the audio portal "blam" vote, why is that cause for a review ban?

At 3/16/09 03:16 PM, Routanne wrote: Hi, its me again. Hope you dont mind answering another...

Lizzardis isn't a review moderator, so as with any regular user, take his advice with a grain of salt. He's more concerned with helping people provide useful reviews, not tell you how to spot abusive reviews.

So what he says in his thread doesn't really have anything to do with this thread. If you would like to critique his review suggestions, you will need to do that there, not here.

At 3/17/09 07:11 PM, SlntCobra1 wrote: Yea, I got a question,

I was banned from writing reviews for A WEEK all because I quoted the blam saying on the audio portal. >_>. I even put QUOTATIONS around it for crying out loud. >_>. This had taken place about mid to late september last year, and I was wondering, when it comes to plagiarism, as long as I give the author or where it came from with the quotes, I'm safe. Yet, when I quoted the audio portal "blam" vote, why is that cause for a review ban?

it's pretty clear in the review guidelines:

Do not use reviews to express your feelings that the entry should be BLAMMED. If you post "BLAM this" or something similar you will be banned. Use the review option to tell the author how they can improve their work.

it even says you'll get banned for it...

but I would suggest reading the ban message the moderator left you (It was in the PM below what exactly you wrote) if you are wondering why exactly you were banned.

If you were saying that somebody was stealing, well, thats against the guidelines as well:

If you believe an entry is stolen, do not comment about it in your review. If you are wrong, you may convince other users that the entry is stolen and you may cause a legitimate entry to receive an unfairly low score, or have the whistle blown on it. Use the whistle option, if available, to flag the entry as stolen when you believe that is the case. If there is no whistle option available (the entry is no longer under judgment) contact Wade with as many details as you can about the stolen Flash and where you think it was stolen from.

so no, providing links to the original and saying somebody is stealing work is not going to get you off in regards to reviews. As stated in the review guidelines, if you find something that is stolen you should PM WadeFulp with that type of information, not leave a review, since reviews have nothing to do with whether an entry is allowed on the site or not.

Although, without seeing your actual review, I can't really tell you what you did wrong. If you would like to know why you were banned and why it got the length it did, you would need to send a message to the review moderator who banned you (which is provided in the PM you received from M-Bot when you were banned).

So thats a no for telling them if I voted 0-1?

But it is ok to tell them if its 2-5 right?

I already know the guidelines and stuff, I was talking about how does quoting the zero vote in the audio portal end up getting me a 7 day ban? Also, I deleted the message a long time ago. I didn't even use the word blam in my review at all.

At 3/17/09 07:36 PM, Routanne wrote: So thats a no for telling them if I voted 0-1?

But it is ok to tell them if its 2-5 right?

yea sure.

At 3/17/09 07:37 PM, SlntCobra1 wrote: I already know the guidelines and stuff, I was talking about how does quoting the zero vote in the audio portal end up getting me a 7 day ban? Also, I deleted the message a long time ago. I didn't even use the word blam in my review at all.

Since you don't have the PM, and seem reluctant to share in this thread what it is you wrote, you can feel free to PM me to discuss this further. All I can tell from what you have shared is that you copy/pasted the message that pops up when you over over the 0/5 on the voting bar in the audio portal...which is just the same as saying "this ought to be blammed" which would fall under the rule about blam comments and similar phrases.

the length of a ban is totally up to the individual moderator, but most mods will consider what rule you broke, how many rules you broke and how many reviews you've already had deleted. if you broke more than one rule and have had a lot of previously deleted reviews, I can see how you may get a 7 day ban.

I have a question about whistling stolen work. This situation happened a while ago, when someone tryed to pretend they were SambakZa and they were releasing the NEW There she is!. However, it was just a pile of crap/spam. Should it be whistled as stolen because the person is stealing the idea for the next episode or not because the actual flash file is not There she is!?

At 3/19/09 12:16 PM, cainine-k9 wrote: I have a question about whistling stolen work. This situation happened a while ago, when someone tryed to pretend they were SambakZa and they were releasing the NEW There she is!. However, it was just a pile of crap/spam. Should it be whistled as stolen because the person is stealing the idea for the next episode or not because the actual flash file is not There she is!?

This obviously doesn't have to do with reviews, but nonetheless, here's an answer:

Unless the actual Flash file is stolen, you should not flag the submission. Users don't (in ALMOST every case) have exclusive rights to use whatever name they use for their series..

At 3/19/09 12:21 PM, AllReligiousDrunk wrote: This obviously doesn't have to do with reviews, but nonetheless, here's an answer:

That reminds me: is there a specific thread for asking about abusive/stolen flashes around here somewhere? I tried the search bar and nothing obvious came up.

Also (back to the point of this post): Can I have some of my reviews removed by request? If I PM someone telling them which ones, will they be deleted, or do they have to be 'abusive' for anyone to want to remove them, request or not?

At 3/19/09 04:19 PM, Sheizenhammer wrote:

At 3/19/09 12:21 PM, AllReligiousDrunk wrote: This obviously doesn't have to do with reviews, but nonetheless, here's an answer:

That reminds me: is there a specific thread for asking about abusive/stolen flashes around here somewhere? I tried the search bar and nothing obvious came up.

The rules for whistling submissions are pretty straight forward. If you have a hunch, you can do a few simple searches on google and check out the userpage and website of the submitter. If you aren't sure, it's best not to flag somebody's hard work (potentially).

Also (back to the point of this post): Can I have some of my reviews removed by request? If I PM someone telling them which ones, will they be deleted, or do they have to be 'abusive' for anyone to want to remove them, request or not?

Short answer: they would need to be abusive to be deleted.

Long answer: although some mods may do this for you, it would need to be for very recently made reviews (say a few moments after you left a review you realized that you mistakenly gave it a 0/10 and was talking about Portal Defenders when in reality you just posted a review for Foamy 145464654654654), and it can't be a common occurrence. If you can't take the time to proofread your reviews or ask yourself if this is something you really want to hang around the site for some time...you shouldn't expect a volunteer moderator to waste his or her time cleaning it up for you. Spelling mistakes or embarrassing reviews you don't like anymore are sort of a waste of time for us unless they really are abusive. And of course, it would need to be a moderator willing to do it. Since we all have our good and bad days, it could be hit and miss. I would err on the side of caution and just write better reviews and avoid the whole situation.

At 3/19/09 09:41 PM, Malachy wrote:

At 3/19/09 04:19 PM, Sheizenhammer wrote:

At 3/19/09 12:21 PM, AllReligiousDrunk wrote: This obviously doesn't have to do with reviews, but nonetheless, here's an answer:

That reminds me: is there a specific thread for asking about abusive/stolen flashes around here somewhere? I tried the search bar and nothing obvious came up.

The rules for whistling submissions are pretty straight forward. If you have a hunch, you can do a few simple searches on google and check out the userpage and website of the submitter. If you aren't sure, it's best not to flag somebody's hard work (potentially).

Also (back to the point of this post): Can I have some of my reviews removed by request? If I PM someone telling them which ones, will they be deleted, or do they have to be 'abusive' for anyone to want to remove them, request or not?

Short answer: they would need to be abusive to be deleted.

Long answer: although some mods may do this for you, it would need to be for very recently made reviews (say a few moments after you left a review you realized that you mistakenly gave it a 0/10 and was talking about Portal Defenders when in reality you just posted a review for Foamy 145464654654654), and it can't be a common occurrence. If you can't take the time to proofread your reviews or ask yourself if this is something you really want to hang around the site for some time...you shouldn't expect a volunteer moderator to waste his or her time cleaning it up for you. Spelling mistakes or embarrassing reviews you don't like anymore are sort of a waste of time for us unless they really are abusive. And of course, it would need to be a moderator willing to do it. Since we all have our good and bad days, it could be hit and miss. I would err on the side of caution and just write better reviews and avoid the whole situation.

So... since I did leave some shitty reviews once I became an NG user, if I request a mod to remove it, chances are that it will still stay here? Right now, I learned through the hard way how to write useful reviews; back then, it was a stupid one-line phrase with no advice (for low-scored reviews).

After going through some of the new submissions, I saw a SHIT load of reviews that say 'How did this pass judgment?' or something similar to that. Is it still abusive because the way I interpret it, the user is indirectly saying that the submission should have been blammed.

There are also a lot of 'Go to hell' or 'Shoot yourself' or 'Hang yourself' reviews in NG as well...

When the review box opens, it says that if someone gives it a low score, they have to provide some criticism. I saw a lot of reviews saying 'This was horrible' with the title 'BAD' and they didn't have any criticism. Is it abusive?

How about one review that has a 10 in it and says 'AAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS OOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMEEEEEE!!!!!!!!' in it and nothing more? Abusive? It's 1 word stretched to use up 2-5 lines. What if it's the same thing except a '0' with the word 'horrible' stretched out?

Do abusive reviews that get marked as helpful lose their title as 'abusive'?

Would discouraging the author (not shouting insults) make the review abusive?

Crap... there are some questions I can't get out of my head...

I swear, NG needs more review moderators...

This is abusive, right? Nearly every review is

"0 + 0 + 1 - 1 = 0
Conratulations you got a big 0!"

At 3/21/09 01:04 PM, SuperMarioBrosS wrote: After going through some of the new submissions, I saw a SHIT load of reviews that say 'How did this pass judgment?' or something similar to that. Is it still abusive because the way I interpret it, the user is indirectly saying that the submission should have been blammed.

yes, that is abusive.

There are also a lot of 'Go to hell' or 'Shoot yourself' or 'Hang yourself' reviews in NG as well...

totally abusive. Have you even read the review guidelines? Because your questions seem to be answered in them pretty clearly.

When the review box opens, it says that if someone gives it a low score, they have to provide some criticism. I saw a lot of reviews saying 'This was horrible' with the title 'BAD' and they didn't have any criticism. Is it abusive?

yes

How about one review that has a 10 in it and says 'AAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSS OOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMEEEEEE!!!!!!!!' in it and nothing more? Abusive? It's 1 word stretched to use up 2-5 lines. What if it's the same thing except a '0' with the word 'horrible' stretched out?

that's flooding the review space. Again, this is covered in the review guidelines.

Do abusive reviews that get marked as helpful lose their title as 'abusive'?

no, the "helpful"/"unhelpful" and "abusive" buttons have no relation to each other. A review will only not be flagged as abusive after a moderator clears the flags off of it.

Would discouraging the author (not shouting insults) make the review abusive?

it's not nice to do, but that would probably fall under "unhelpful", but for the most part most reviews of a discouraging nature are "stop trying" and "don't make another" which is abusive.

Crap... there are some questions I can't get out of my head...

I swear, NG needs more review moderators...

why? we are doing fine. Abusive reviews are being flagged, and we are dealing with it. Pretty much everyone is a review moderator. If you see an abusive review, you can flag it as abusive and then it goes to us to delete it off the site. Usually a flagged review will be dealt with in a couple of days of being written because people are flagging them. Obviously we can't be everywhere at all times, which is why there is the flag option. So in reality, we have over a million moderators helping stop abusive reviews.

At 3/22/09 01:38 PM, scottmale24 wrote: This is abusive, right? Nearly every review is

"0 + 0 + 1 - 1 = 0
Conratulations you got a big 0!"

looks like it is already gone, so yes?

please remember, this thread is primarily for helping out with understanding WHY your review may have been deleted and secondarily to answer non-specific questions about flagging.

Heres my question. How is this review abusive when I have pretty much described the submission and why its bad?

===============
Score: 2 / 10
Summary: Effortless, wasn't much of a movie.
Review: The movie had a long load time for what it actually was, just a spinning swirl and some music. After waitiing for the submission to load, and clicking play, thats all that happened.

Thats why I voted a 1. The preloader is ok, but the movie itself is boring. Theres nothing really going on after clicking play apart from the background of the preloader still spinning, and some music playing.
===============

I might have called it effortless but it was actually just a swirly background and music once you clicked Play. I described the submission, and why it was bad, but it still got deleted.

I realised one mistake with it, that I said "thats why I voted a 1", when I voted a 2/10 in the review. But I'm not sure if thats the reason why the review was deleted.

At 3/23/09 12:57 PM, Clbull wrote: Heres my question. How is this review abusive when I have pretty much described the submission and why its bad?

We're only human, so sometimes we will make the occasional mistake. Your review may have been between some abusive reviews on our list, and it was deleted accidentally. Or perhaps there was more to the submission, but for whatever reason, it didn't fully load for you, so your review isn't accurate. If you feel that isn't the case, you are more than welcome to resubmit that particular review.

Looking at the review, it appears you were reviewing a possible spam submission. Although reviewing these spammy submissions is not an issue as long as those reviews are helpful, I personally recommend ignoring these flashes rather than giving the spam artist the attention s/he craves.

Hope that helps.

I'm not trying to increase my post count.

I took your advice (Malachy) and read the review guidelines. Now some questions (that I couldn't remember asking in my previous post) now arose.

Final post before I'm off to clean up this place.

* Stay on the topic of the submission and do not make personal remarks or insults towards the
author. This is a big offense. Telling artists "You suck!", "You should go kill yourself!", "You are
gay!" :etc., will get you banned and you may lose your account. Without our contributors
Newgrounds :wouldn't be what it is, so we take seriously any insults directed at them by reviewers.

Understand that. However, is criticizing the artist's work like saying 'This was bullshit' abusive?

* Do not post TONS and TONS of crappy reviews just to get high in the rankings. If we catch
someone doing this we will delete all their reviews - wouldn't that be a pain in the ass? Take your
time and write a sincere review for every movie you wish to critique. Make sure your review is
relative to the submission. Reviews that are found to offer no benefit to the author may be deleted.

If I find a user making tons of crappy reviews, can I PM a moderator, then start flagging all of them or should I just PM the moderator and avoid flagging them?

Also, this one confused me. Especially this line:

Reviews that are found to offer no benefit to the author may be deleted.

Can I act like I'm the author of the submissions and mark reviews as abusive if they provide no benefit to me? (Me acting as if I'm the author of the submission.) Answer to this question will clarify a HUGE amount of issues.

* Do not use the review field to address other user's reviews you didn't agree with. You are to be : reviewing the submission, not other people's reviews.

So if someone makes a reference to someone's review and supports that review, then is that abusive?

Is criticizing the work AND leaving general tips abusive?

Example: (I made this up)

---Review---
Score: 0/10
Title: Well that was shit
Review: Seriously, that was bullshit. Try harder and spend more time in flash. Also, get more practice.

Would that review be abusive? I see a lot of 'try harder' reviews with a score of 0 (and nothing more) and I don't know if it would be beneficial to the author or useless to the author?

Whistles:

Yes I'm aware about the whistle rule for this thread, but this has nothing to do with whistle points or that stuff.

Let's say I have a deity whistle (which I'm on my way to get). I mark a review as abusive and NOBODY else marks it. Then, after another review has been written, 2 people with normal whistles flag it. When a review moderators is active, will they look at the one marked by the 1 deity or the one marked by 2 normals? Someone told me that just 1 person marking a review as abusive (regardless of whistle stat) isn't enough for the review to get a mod's attention.

Using an alternative account to spew abusive reviews to get whistle points will cause an account termination for both accounts. However, if someone creates another account, can they use that account AND their original account to flag an abusive review made by someone else? Will it result in account termination? I thought of this because the other person may be desperate to get whistle points and wants to use an alt to mark abusive reviews along with marking with the main account. That way, if both accounts have normal whistles, then the review will get whistled twice by the same person with 2 accounts. (No, I won't create a 2nd account since management is a huge bitch.)

I really want to clean up this site (because NG doesn't deserve bullshit) so I want to ask those questions so that I can get to work. If I am marking things incorrectly, I still have a chance to regain points before I get stuck with a garbage whistle for the SECOND time!

At 3/24/09 04:44 PM, SuperMarioBrosS wrote:

I'm not trying to increase my post count.

I took your advice (Malachy) and read the review guidelines. Now some questions (that I couldn't remember asking in my previous post) now arose.

Final post before I'm off to clean up this place.

The guidelines are for reviewing, not flagging. If it is ABUSIVE you should flag it as such. Abusive reviews should jump off the page to you. You seem far more concerned with gaining whistle levels than actually helping authors so I really don't see much point in continuing this drawn out conversation. If you are still confused, PM a review moderator.

I really want to clean up this site (because NG doesn't deserve bullshit) so I want to ask those questions so that I can get to work. If I am marking things incorrectly, I still have a chance to regain points before I get stuck with a garbage whistle for the SECOND time!

abusive reviews get dealt with regardless. You don't need to worry about trying to cheat the system by making a new account to flag stuff. If nobody else is flagging it, chances are it's not actually abusive and all you are doing is getting yourself 2 garbage whistles in a row.

It is also not known how many people are needed/what levels give you towards marking reviews. All that is known about the whistle system is that if you are good at it, you will have more weight when you flag something, and if you do poorly, you will get a garbage whistle and we won't have to worry about you throwing non-abusive stuff our way anymore.

Since it is stated in the reviews guidelines to use proper grammar are reviews post with all caps abusive?

At 3/25/09 11:51 PM, The777Demon wrote: Since it is stated in the reviews guidelines to use proper grammar are reviews post with all caps abusive?

You could also use that argument to claim anyone who uses the letter U instead of the word "you", forgets to use punctuation or has poor spelling could also be banned and have their reviews deleted. But since these things aren't specifically stated in the review guidelines (like how the BBS rules include a rule against all caps posts), it would not be fair to delete otherwise fine reviews simply because they were done in all caps. But, in most cases an all caps review may be abusive because of other reasons.

At 3/27/09 06:07 PM, TheSongSalad wrote: would
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/48 8767
the review that just says rly stupid game be abusive?

Please read the whole thread before posting, as I've asked that users not post specific reviews which they feel may be abusive to avoid this thread turning into another Rage's gift to you: abusive reviews.

yes, reviews saying the game is stupid, shitty, crappy etc. are abusive.

Wow it could take years for my reviews to be judged. I made one mistake last year and flagged about 50 old reviews when i had a normal whistle. So Do i have hundreds of negative points because of that? When you said large chunk in the op do you mean 10 negative points for a false flag or something lower?

At 3/28/09 10:55 PM, The777Demon wrote: I made one mistake last year and flagged about 50 old reviews when i had a normal whistle. So Do i have hundreds of negative points because of that?

We have no way of seeing your whistle points, so there's no way of finding out.

Also, some of those reviews that you flagged may have been cleared without penalty, so you may not have gotten negative points for each one you flagged... although, like I said, no way to know.

Well I've got a new question now. I just found three submissions with massive amounts of abusive reviews however some of the reviews are abusive towards another submission in agreement with the one I'm looking at. Since they are still abusive towards another submission do i flag them?

At 3/29/09 06:43 PM, The777Demon wrote: Well I've got a new question now. I just found three submissions with massive amounts of abusive reviews however some of the reviews are abusive towards another submission in agreement with the one I'm looking at. Since they are still abusive towards another submission do i flag them?

I don't know what you are talking about, give an example. Best thing I can say for now is if a review is off topic, then probably is abusive. Of course, I have no way of knowing till I see for myself.

At 3/29/09 06:58 PM, kidray76 wrote:
I don't know what you are talking about, give an example. Best thing I can say for now is if a review is off topic, then probably is abusive. Of course, I have no way of knowing till I see for myself.

People are saying another person's submission suck in their reviews instead of saying his submission sucks.

At 3/29/09 07:07 PM, The777Demon wrote: People are saying another person's submission suck in their reviews instead of saying his submission sucks.

yes, those types of reviews would be abusive, since they aren't even talking about the submission they're supposed to be reviewing.

At 3/29/09 08:40 PM, SuperMarioBrosS wrote: So do those flags turn from deity & bronze to deity & silver or stay as deity & bronze?

unknown. The whistle points are not known. they aren't shown on any type of mod, admin or regular user's page, so there's no way to find out, even for us, who flagged what or what level can do what.

Am i allowed to flag all of the abusive reviews from Aprils fools day?