Is there a way to add another alert reason for posting untrue information?

[EarlG]

35. Well, no offense, but ironically there's a lot of misinformation in your post that I need to correct

The Jury system is not "sometimes" faster than expert moderators. It is significantly faster in every single situation. In the last 24 hours, the longest time between an alert being sent and a decision being rendered by a Jury was 16 minutes. Blatant rule violations, such as commercial spam posts by spambots, are typically dealt with in under five minutes, even in the middle of the night. There is no moderator-powered system anywhere on the Internet that can beat that response time.

I've never forgotten a thread I saw here where there was open discussion by some DUers who'd been here for years about trying to get rid of another DUer who'd been here for years by alerting on all their posts for any possible reason in the hope of rolling the dice enough and getting enough hides to get them FFR'd.

And... what happened? Do you have any evidence that those DUers were actually able to pull off this scheme? Unlikely, because we have all kinds of systems in place to prevent it from happening.

1) You can't just mass alert on all of someone's posts, because as soon as you get an 0-7 LEAVE result, you are blocked from alerting again for 24 hours.

2) When you hit alert, it is sent to seven random DUers. If any of those DUers appear on the alerted member's Jury Blocklist, they are replaced. If any of those DUers posted in the thread that the alerted post is in, they are replaced. If any of those Jury members do not pass the "dice roll" which occurs during the selection process -- which is affected by their longevity on DU, how clean their own record is, etc. -- then they are replaced.

3) The Jury process is anonymous, so you don't know the identity of the person whose post you are adjudicating. Yes, if you really care, you can figure out how to get around this. But you are just one of seven people serving on this Jury. You have no idea who the other Jurors are, and you have no way to find out. You only have 30 minutes to make a decision, or you are replaced. Even if you did have a way to find out who the other Jurors were, it would have to be a massive coincidence for you to be on the same Jury with enough of your collaborators to make a difference. And bear in mind that once you have been called, you cannot be called again for at least 18 hours (under normal circumstances).

In other words, in order to rig the system, you would need to somehow figure out a way to get all of your friends onto the same Jury, multiple times.

AND EVEN THEN...

If you have a post removed which does not break the rules, you can appeal it, and I will put it back. So even if someone somehow manages to get a non-rule-breaking post removed nefariously -- which they can't, let's not forget -- I'll just restore it and remove the strike from the person's record.

Also, I can see the Jury Log which shows who is sending alerts, and who is getting alerted on. If a person, or group of people, ganged up on someone and started alerting all of their posts, first, they'd likely get stopped by the 0-7 lockout, and second, I'd see it in the Jury Log and it would be blatantly obvious what was going on.

Nor have I forgotten how often I had posts alerted on in the 2019-2020 primaries forum. I'd get email about many of the alerts, along with guesses about who was alerting.

Neither you nor anyone else knows how many times you were alerted on, because we do not make that information public. Anybody can say whatever they like in an email! Especially during primary season, when folks just love to stir shit behind the scenes. As for "guesses about who was alerted" -- that is just pure speculation and rumormongering. Most of the time when people make these accusations, they are completely wrong. But they don't know that, because nobody but Admin has any way to know who alerted on anybody else's posts, unless the alerter makes it public themselves.

I suspect one reason there are fewer alerts is that unless the motivation is animosity toward the DUer being alerted on, most DUers DON'T want to alert on a problem post or vote to remove it if that makes it at all likely that DUer will be suspended.

But this is the exact opposite of what you said above. First you suggested that there are roving gangs of DUers openly going around mass alerting on people in order to get them suspended. Now you're suggesting that DUers are shy to alert on other DUers because they *don't* want them to get suspended.

The reason there are fewer alerts than there were under the previous moderator system is simply because it's not possible to "work the refs" under the Jury system, so nobody tries. In the last 24 hours, DUers have sent a total of 20 alerts. Can you believe that? Under the previous moderator system, we would have seen ten times that many alerts in the same time period. Seriously, we would have seen 200 alerts. That's because under a moderator system, people know that their alert is going to be directly adjudicated by a small group of specific people -- maybe some of whom are even friends with the alerter! -- so they do what they can to influence those moderators. It is simply not possible to influence a Jury in the same way.

In the 13 years that the Jury system has been in operation, I've been aware of exactly one serious attempt to undermine it. In that situation, a DU member was using two accounts, which both had multiple thousands of posts. Both accounts also had Star Memberships under different names, in order to increase their Jury chance. The person would alert on a post, and then would refresh their other account in a separate browser, hoping to get called to that Jury.

Note that even going to this insane amount of trouble, they only had the chance of filling ONE Jury slot out of seven. And for what it's worth, as soon as they started doing this, they were immediately caught and banned. What a waste of time.

I wish the number of hidden posts resulting in an FFR resulted in only a temporary suspension, with that DUer then offered a second chance (but that second chance allowing for more than one hide before a second, permanent suspension).

I don't necessarily disagree with this and may revisit the way it works in future. However, I will say this: It is really, really, really easy to NOT get suspended on DU. Look at all the many hundreds of people posting all around you, some of whom have been here for a couple of decades, many of whom have never had a single post removed. I really don't feel super strongly about offering repeat rule-breakers multiple chances. Once someone starts receiving post removal warnings, my feeling is that it is up to them to moderate their OWN behavior. If they cannot do that, then they will inevitably end up suspended.