>>13635>>13637>>13638>>13639I'm not going to refute all of this bit by bit but I do want to say - and I wrote this before you reposted and adding wanting an apology - that I recognise the toll it takes on the users when spammers abuse the site being under-moderated and I feel deep guilt about letting the site devolve to this. Of course it burns you out. I see all the suggestions on how to deal with the spam and abuse and they usually sound reasonable and I wish I could implement them, but it's not as simple as it seems - let's use the example of not having enough moderators: It's not that I don't want to add more staff, but I have to be 100% sure about who I bring on or the whole thing is pointless. There are obvious problems with this, so our team is small, but I reiterate that new mods have been added in the past months.
In the past at times the CSAM spam was so bad I shut off image uploads entirely because many mods had quit due to the raids and I didn't want to risk having the site raided while I was asleep or afk. Maybe having a website with "opening hours" would be fun, but not like this. Since returning I have implemented better protection both for the user-facing part of the website as well as for the moderators so they don't have to be subjected to shock images. I did this because once again I'm aware how soul-destroying this is. In my private life I talk about the horrifying evil shit moids attempt both on the site and in my inboxes all the time because it's such an incredible concept to rationalise in the first place and it really fucks me up, but venting about it publicly would just feed into it.
I don't post about any of these difficulties because I'm aware I was MIA for a long time and have to try to fix some of the damage before doing anything else or even whining about the position I'm in. I'm just trying to keep the board usable and give updates and once we can see definite improvements (I have something in the works that will hopefully make a huge difference) I will open a bigger conversation about the less terrible things we can change to make using the site more fun. I consider this part of my apology, I'm trying to put actions before words, even if it's behind the scenes.
I made the site almost 10 years ago when I was
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