Whiney Mac Fanboy's Journal: An open letter to Taco on Pudge's abuse of power.

Taco,

An entry you wrote on the Slashdot FAQ states:

What sorts of anti-troll filters exist?

A handful of filters have been put into place to try to make sure that people don't abuse the system. The most important is that the same person can't post more than once every 120 seconds. Also, if a single user is moderated down several times in a short time frame, a temporary ban will be imposed on that user... a cooling off period if you will. It lasts for 72 hours, or more for users who have posted a ton.

The vast majority of you will never encounter any of these troll filters. If you do encounter one unfairly, let us know so we can fix it. This stuff is fairly beta code, so there are bound to be problems. [emph mine]

Yet Pudge can post a comment at 12:50, 12:51, 12:52 and 12:53.

In the same story, Pudge posted over 60 times (and counting!) in a five hour period, many times less than 120s since his last post.

I understand allowing the editors certain freedoms that you can't give to a wider audience, but allowing your own editors to troll the Slashdot readers and abuse the filters set to stop such behavior is frankly a little sad.

If you agree that Taco needs to revoke Pudge's editor account, please reply below.

D2

[harry666t]

Do you remember the old discussion system, without all the AJAX bells&whistles? Someone stated shortly after the changes were announced, that the faster an internet discussion goes, the worse it gets. We're having an example of this, I guess.

I don't personally have anything against Pudge (or anyone else on /.), but if you say he's abusing his power, then I think he's irresponsible, and certainly some of his extra privileges should be taken away.

starting to agree with Squiggy

[frankie]

Slashdot is becoming less and less useful to me as it grows wider. I think I might switch to Ars as my primary tech source.

But in any case, I also agree with you that the Admins (including Taco) should also abide by the speed limit and most other rules they set for users.

Re:

[unlametheweak]

All of my successfully submitted stories have been from Ars Technica (I've got about a 50% successful submission rate). It's a very good Web site.

Do not agree

[Captain Splendid]

As an unabashed non-lover of Pudge, I still can't really agree. Two reasons:

-Staff needs the leeway, simple as that.
-Not gonna happen. If you've been here long enough, you should know by now that management really doesn't give a shit about users and their preferences. Your pleas will fall on deaf ears.

Editor?

[damn_registrars]

I don't think Pudge is an editor anymore, though I could be wrong. He claims in his profile [slashdot.org] that he used to edit stories. We could give him the benefit of the doubt here and consider that to possibly be true.

However, if he is the monkey who wrote the new slashdot code (that renders worse than shit on most systems), then he probably deserves to be fired for that. He may well just be abusing his powers as an employee... If you read his journal [slashdot.org] (not recommended unless you recently had a frontal lobotomy)