Sent this to Athens and JMD yesterday
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Hi, I would like to raise one important issue with ATRL Administrators regarding the recent changes.
Ever since the changes to Warning Point categories, there has been a lot of confusion among members as well as Moderators regarding the Disruptive category.
Pointless category was removed because it was too ambiguous and frankly pointless in itself. Pointless points were given for posting smileys or gif images in a comment without adding any text to it. A lot of members complained on why their smiley was warned while the rest of the members on the same page with same or similar responses weren't. And so the category was removed for a good reason.
Disruptive category was put in its place, which now awards points for "Spamming gifs/images/smileys/random keys, posting a pointless thread or posting too many times in a row."
The category seems really simple and straightforward to me: you get warned for being literally being disruptive. The category was also introduced so that people stop reporting each other for the use a single smiley or a gif image as a reply and save the mods the time to deal with numerous "pointless reports".
However, not much has changed. I feel that neither members nor moderators fully understand the new category. People still report each other for the use of aforementioned reasons, but the sad part is that moderators still warn them for "Pointless".
They don't understand the key aspect of the category and that is "spamming" or "overusing": for example using a wall of gif images in a comment, some people use 20+ copies of same gif images in their comments to express their extreme emotion, but that is truly disruptive to scroll through that and it disturbs the flow of threads. But they don't get warned for that if they used some text along with it, i.e. circumventing the old Pointless category. However mods don't warn for it because they get tricked into thinking that it doesn't fall under Pointless category anymore, where as it falls perfectly under the Disruptive category and should be warned.
I must admit the "random key spamming" aspect of the category is rather ambiguous. Does it mean you can't press the same letter/random letters sever times in one response or does it mean you can't keep doing it over and over in your replies in a thread? Does anything change if your random letters were accompanied by proper text? I've seen people getting warned for using a few random letters along with meaningful text and I've seen people not getting warned for using whole paragraphs of random key strokes without any proper text added to it. So there needs to be some clarification on this particular aspect of the category.
Moderators also still warn the use of single smileys in comments when it shouldn't be warned under new categories.
I feel there needs to be a little clarification on the issue, maybe in the Mod Squad, so that at least Moderators themselves understand the Disruptive category.
Thank you for your time and sorry to bother you with such a long letter.
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I know I'm too much sometimes
and making a girly sound when you encounter one of Tiziano's gifs. I don't think banning the gifs would solve anything though. I suggest posting more of them so you can develop an immunity.
