I'm locking this now to prevent flamewars, but I'll forward this thread to our community managers and let them respond.

Edited out some parts of the letter (though saved them elsewhere for admins to read), because it targeted another user specifically. Either I or someone else will respond to the letter more generally when we have time, but note that it's never appropriate to complain about one specific user so extensively in a public post.

This already exists. It's the second setting in the "General" section on the page you reach in "Edit Community Settings".

While some other people in the office work through this post, I'd like to address a pattern I've seen a lot on the site recently. I post here because I suspect this topic is getting plenty of attention.

It goes like this: User X does something immature, spazzy, and unproductive. User Y then does something mean to User X. User Y has made a critical error here: User Y has changed the story from "User X is immature and unproductive" to "User Y is mean". And being mean is worse than being immature and unproductive. Moreover, admins now have 2 problems to deal with (or 3 or 4 or 5, when other User Y's pile on). Because being mean is worse than being immature and unproductive, we have to deal with "mean" first. We try to deal with both, to varying degrees of success, but we definitely deal with "mean" first. There is no excuse for being mean.

Had User Y simply reported the post and explained what was going on, we admins could focus on the behavior of User X. Instead, we're stuck dealing with Users etc., first. If the Users would be part of the solution rather than exacerbating the problem, we might be able to make more progress.

First of all, to the users who contributed to this letter: Thank you for your apology, and for taking the time to write out your suggestions.

Below, we’ll try to address the various concerns you brought up in your letter. We’ve regrouped some points that were similar so that we can respond to them all at once. While we won’t be able comment on every single thing you mentioned, I hope that these responses that I and other site admins put together address all of the overarching points you brought up.


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Finding ways to decrease the amount of spam that’s posted in the first place is certainly a goal of ours – though it’s a less straightforward task than dealing with spam and other inappropriate posts that have already been made. However, most of the posts in this section aren’t clear-cut examples of spam (although it might have been difficult to find examples because any threads created in Site Support for the sole purpose of spamming or trolling are deleted). While AoPS is indeed primarily intended to be a website about mathematical problem solving, Site Support is intended to be a place where users can ask questions related to any aspect of the site and where they can report issues about the site. Emoticons and avatars are not super vital components of our website, but if a user has questions about them, they should ask these questions on Site Support.

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Both of those threads are now cleaned up! Threads like these are good places to use the report button. If you want to help out further, you could lead by example by posting a full solution in threads where people have been posting only the answer.

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There are ways to contact those of us who send private messages through AoPS Sheriff – posting on this forum, emailing sheriff@aops.com, etc. – and we’ll try to make these options more obvious. I’ll see if it would be possible to add info about how to contact us when users try to PM the Sheriff, or something like that, but do note that even if it is possible it might take some time to be implemented.

In general, remember that we have dozens of situations to deal with every day on the Community. Sometimes we misfire with our responses. Sometimes we take the right action but give the wrong reason. Keep in mind that while we try to keep an eye on the Community overall, we can’t follow exactly what is happening in every thread. We certainly don’t deliberately wait to deal with issues on the Community – sometimes they just aren’t reported to us until days or even weeks after they take place. I’d encourage you to make use of the “Further Details” box when reporting issues if you want to clarify what the issue is with the thread/post you’re reporting.

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We can’t give tons of details about each of these cases – AoPS Sheriff messages are sent as private messages for a reason – but here are some general comments:

- Please keep in mind that we have a lot of information about users' activities that you don't have. People you don't think should be banned will not necessarily tell you about all of those activities. Remember that the most trolly/spammy/etc. posts on AoPS are deleted, so even if the posts in a thread or by a particular user seem fine to you, there were likely posts you didn’t see that led to us locking a thread or restricting a user from posting.

- On the flip side, don’t assume we haven’t contacted a particular user you’ve seen spamming. When we have time, we try to make public posts in threads that have been derailed by spam or trolling as well to give general advice that could help both the users posting spam in those threads and any other users who see it (hopefully we’ll now have more time to do this if we only have to deal with unintentional spam). However, if we want to contact particular users about their behavior in more detail we’ll contact them privately – singling out users extensively in public doesn’t benefit them or the Community in general.

- Even if a user has previously contributed positively to our Community or mathematical achievements, we’re not going to ignore it if they start spamming or trolling. In fact, if a user has been on AoPS for a long time, we probably have higher expectations for that user’s posts. We’re not happy either when we have to ban or restrict users that have previously made good contributions to our Community.

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Again, don’t assume that the Sheriff hasn’t contacted a particular user (I haven’t looked up this particular incident, but if a user is spamming extensively and has been reported for doing so, I’m sure we’ve contacted them). However, as rrusczyk explained in the post above, we do sometimes have to deal with the response to spam before we deal with the spam itself – just telling another user they are not mature and have bad grammar/spelling is not a respectful or helpful response.

Also, remember that “insult the user who’s spamming” and “let the user spam freely” aren’t the only two options available to you! Insulting a user who’s unintentionally spamming, perhaps because they’re younger and new to the forums, doesn’t show them how to be a better user – it just makes the AoPS Community a place where these users feel insecure and scared of being attacked for their age or English skills. This could in turn chase away users who are interested in mathematics and who might have been able to make positive contributions to our Community in the future. Instead of telling a spammy user that they are immature, giving them specific advice on how to make better posts would be more productive. Here’s an example of a better response in a scenario like the one you described: “If you hope to be a moderator of our forum, you should try to make posts that contribute positively to our forum and follow its rules, which are (insert list of rules or link to post with rules here)”.

One way to double check whether or not your post is constructive criticism is to try to put yourself in the other user’s shoes. When you were less mature (and we were all less mature when we were younger, by definition), what would you have found more helpful: being told that you weren’t mature or being given specific advice and goals? Side note: keep this in mind in general when making posts online. Earlier in your letter, while describing a thread that was locked for a reason other than the one you expected, you wrote that “any sentient person who glanced at the thread would have concluded that the post was not meant to be taken seriously”. Insulting someone is not an effective way to get them to listen to your advice. Furthermore, remember that you don’t have facial expressions or tones of voice online, so criticisms and insults tend to come across harshly even if you didn’t intend them to.

If you think a user was spamming on purpose (i.e., it wasn’t just a user who is new to the forums and is unintentionally spamming) or you can’t think of a positive+helpful way to respond, though, it’s always fine to just report the post so that we can deal with it. We have definitely banned some users temporarily because of spamming, just as we have banned the people who are mean to them. Also, as we mentioned earlier in terms of the Alcumus forum, you can try to show others how to make good posts by focusing on making good posts yourself.

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That is odd; my best guess is that the post was accidentally deleted as well when the post below it (which was spam) was deleted. I’ve un-deleted it and deleted the post asking why the first one was deleted, since it’s no longer relevant.


Now, on to the suggested solutions. We aren’t going to specifically address each of the possible site changes you mentioned, but we will pass them along to the developers who work on the Community. However, note that all of our developers are very busy with other projects right now, so even those changes that do get added to their to-do list won’t be implemented immediately. Also, we don’t think that some of the changes suggested (like reorganized the dropdown menus, editing the forums on My AoPS, or colors on the front page) would have a particularly huge impact – at the very least, not as big as an impact as all of you leading by example by making constructive posts and helping us deal with spam by reporting posts.

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That is an interesting idea – we want to have the most active forums near the top of the Other Forums box, but stickying some particularly noteworthy forums to the top so they don’t disappear down the list if they’re temporarily less active would be nice. Again, this wouldn’t be implemented for a while even if the developer of the Community agrees that it’s a good idea, but I wanted to note that I personally like it

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The rules in the MSM forum were developed as a collaboration between the moderators of that forum and site administrators; we’ll look into creating Rules+FAQs announcement threads in other forums. We’ll also go through the suggested edits to the MSM rules, but note that we have to strike a balance between thoroughness and brevity when creating rule posts like that – in general, people don’t like to spend a long time reading through a list of rules. Also, while I’ll pass on the various suggestions for changing how announcements appear in forums, I think having them not be visible from the main Community page was a deliberate decision of the developer because they took up too much space otherwise. Links to articles/threads that have particularly good advice about how to prepare for particular math contests would be helpful, but probably would be incorporated into the same Rules+FAQs thread for similar reasons.

To briefly address the point of such posts “clogging up forums”, I’ll quote a previous post I made in response to a user who was concerned about multiple posts about a similar problem overwhelming MSM: “If someone posts a thread within a day or two of another thread on the same topic in MSM, feel free to make a post directing people in the new thread to the other recent one and then report the duplicate thread so that we can lock it (but – and this is directed at users in general, not to anyone specific – don't yell at the user for posting a duplicate thread. If they're new to AoPS and just aren't good at navigating the forums yet, that wouldn't exactly be a welcoming first experience for them!) However, if it's a month or so, while that might seem recent to you, that's actually plenty of time for a thread to be buried in MSM and it certainly isn't clogging up the forum.” In terms about multiple posts asking for general advice about preparing for a math contest, if some useful links are added to the Rules+FAQ threads in forums, I’d recommend pointing users at those links first so that they can read them and then follow up with any more specific questions they have.

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Wanted to comment on this quickly – when testing this site originally, some people didn't realize that "Community" (and, similarly, "School", "Bookstore", and "Resources") was clickable, so we made sure that someone new to our site would still be able to get to the forums even if they didn't think that they could click on "Community"!

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Again, thank you for recognizing that responding to spam by trolling or making otherwise inappropriate posts only exacerbates the problem. In this letter, you mentioned a few times that it seems like there’s more spam than usual on the forums. I’m not sure if there’s a definite increase in “spazzy” spam – perhaps there has been just because our Community has grown overall, so there’s more of everything – but I do know that there has been an overall increase in the time we have to spend on issues on the Community, and like rrusczyk mentioned we have to deal with issues where a user was being mean first.

To wrap all of this up, we want the AoPS Community to be a place where users can have constructive mathematical conversation, while letting students also use the forums as a social space that they might not have access to in their schools because of their unique interest and ability in math. We want to support you, because we once were you. It is frustrating for us as well to see users with potential waste their time and ours by responding to spam in unproductive ways, so we’re happy to see that users are beginning to instead spend time thinking about how to contribute positively to the forums. When we don’t have to spend as much time dealing the responses to spam on top of dealing with the spam itself, we have more time to participate in conversations on the forums (and we enjoy being able to interact with all of you outside of sending Sheriff messages!). Hopefully, if we aren’t as distracted by other matters, and experienced users focus on being good role models for new users, we can make our Community even better.

We're now going to unlock this thread, and please heed the advice in this post and don't spam or start flamewars so that we have to lock it.

First of all:
I rate your post (the OP) 9/10, it covers many important points about spammy users that sometimes just want to say something, but they put it in a way that isn't right. Your points are clearly stating how sometimes there is mess-ups that the admins consider.
Here are the two forums you can post spam (appropriate spam):
Fun Factory
Frivolous Forum
Lately, I've seen spam drifiting to other fora.
Also, I was unaware that CantonMathGuy was banned, but from your POV, it was completely unnecessary. A warning, in my opinion, would have been fit for that. Note that I'm not saying that the AoPS admins are doing a bad job, they are great at what they are doing and that's why we have this beautiful website. But, everyone makes mistakes. Everyone, from admins to normal users do. There are users that don't post great content (a little hypocritical on my side to say that), then the people who respond to that in an unkind way (like rrusczyk stated).
Also, I was a little confused when you said on Generic_Username posting the "Ban Me Sheriff" , where it was said his/her's account was immediately deactivated. If that is true, then how are you posting?
But aside from that, you're suggestions were creative and looked to be something decent. I have, like many users, have changed my opinion on downvotes.
I really appreciate your so-called writing group (on a math website ) on posting this, and I hope people try to make the community great again use this message to help AoPS be a better website.

Thanks, LauraZed, for your response!

We still have some questions, a couple of suggestions I'm not sure if I'm missing something obvious, but what would be the downside of being able to PM AoPSSheriff, as opposed to emailing? Obviously most people won't want to post about their warnings in the fora, and emailing just adds another layer of complexity. We understand that questions about emotes and avatars, are appropriate, but sometimes the posts are either inappropriate or wrong. For example this post is obviously inspected. The "glitch" is obviously not legit; for more proof, the 107 people that upvoted the post in that "screenshot" are the exact same 107 people that upvoted this post.
We're not trying to accuse these users; however, it seems increasingly easy to pretend to be a new user and troll like so. We know a user who pretends to be a new user and so posts some spam, and has never been banned. We have told him that he probably shouldn't be doing such things, but the fact that he is able to get away with posting spam like that is not good. If the admins would like, we can tell you all his username and you can confirm.

next, We'd encourage not spamming at all... We contacted the Administrators and they realized the mistake and unbanned me
On this, we have realized that removing one's ability to downvote won't remove their opinion, especially if it's a legitimate opinion. We have tried to be a bit more respectful towards others who post things that we don't believe are productive, but reinstating downvotes will help users realize their mistakes and learn to improve. We realize that the downvote has some flaws; after all, so does the second Amendment. But this doesn't mean we can just take them away. Like guns, some people will abuse this right. But that isn't the problem with the gun, that's the problem with the person. I don't think the person who posts this will realize that they did something wrong until either some others answer to it, which could possibly come off as mean, or administrators notify this person.

That's all for now,
Generic_Username

In addition, from what Wu tells me, the user was asking to be the moderator of a legitimate forum. Wu gave that as his explanation why that user shouldn't be a moderator; he didn't just say that randomly because that user was spamming.

To Generic_Username: Realistically, there is always going to be some spam in these fora. That's good. You probably know this by now, but that wasn't exactly the smartest move.
To be totally honest, I would like to see a change as much as the people who upvoted the OP.

I was recently in the position of getting mean remarks from other users from something they saw as spam that I saw as an innocent poll, and firsthand it is not helping anyone if you give snarky remarks, just tell the user to stop doing whatever they are doing wrong unless they have a history of doing it and won't stop. It wastes your time giving snarky remarks, the admins time cleaning it up, and is not nice to the user. Also people, you do realize that you are not exactly anonymous on the internet, I'm not going to elaborate but just remember it's not that hard to find out who you are if you are trolling knowingly.

I don't have the time right now to respond to the OP in full, but I wanted to cross-post this because I think it's somewhat important:

I would posit that the post in question is indeed unnecessarily mean, and really doesn't serve much purpose other than to gain brownie points with the "in crowd" by making fun of another user. In other words, it is dangerously close to bullying, assuming the context is that kyzcsurr and First do not know each other particularly well (obviously, among friends the circumstances change significantly).

It is true that this is a relatively minor example, and perhaps relatively harmless, but that's not the point. The point is that the post doesn't achieve anything of value (as it is unreasonable to expect First to take the post as constructive criticism), while simultaneously pronouncing a clear message that incorrect grammar/capitalization/English/etc. is not welcome here. This has the measurable (though in this case, obviously small) effect of driving certain classes of users (e.g. younger users) away, especially when posts like the above are made often, tolerated (if not encouraged), and thus shown to be representative of AoPS culture.

To put it another way, if I were a young user making a post like First's, and received a response like kyzcsurr's, it is far more likely for me to simply stop posting rather than for me to think "wow, that's a really good point about my grammar!". This is more true when larger-scale operations (such as the Globai news forum) are undertaken for the specific purpose of exhibiting how much "better" one user is compared to another. To make this perhaps more relatable: if you were to make your first post on, say, stackoverflow (or any site that is typically frequented by people that are more educated than you are) and were downvoted to oblivion with comments like "perhaps you should go back to high school English before trying to do math", then I suspect you would simply not use stackoverflow anymore rather than undertaking great personal effort to improve your English to academic-level standards.

I understand that many feel driving away younger/low quality users is a desirable outcome (this is especially evident in your statement "the internet might not be the right place for them"), but this is simply an unsustainable approach. Obviously I don't have the data to back this up, but I would posit that most AoPS "community leaders" (so to speak) started at a very young age; at least, that has been my personal experience (for comparison/ego's sake, you're welcome to sift through some of my early posts and take note of how impressively low-quality they are). Driving these people away at an early age would have been disastrous in my opinion.

Essentially, the main issue is that you're attempting to apply mid-high school discussion standards to literal children, many of whom are using discussion platforms for the first time in their lives. Just like it wouldn't make sense for a highly-respected professor to pick apart some of our posts to show to his colleagues, it does not make much sense for a respected high school AoPS community leader to pick apart the posts of our younger members to gain upvotes from other high school students who will click the thumbs-up button for anything that can be described as "savage".

Anyway, the above explains why the post in question is bad, but doesn't help too much with what response would be good. I agree and understand that it is awkward to make a post consisting entirely of a grammar correction and patiently explaining why it is necessary, and you (rightfully) probably do not view this as your responsibility. Indeed, the classical correct course of action is to leave it alone (or report it) and allow the moderator to deal with the situation, but it is true that moderators are often overwhelmed (especially in recent times) and don't always have the time to deal with the more minor issues like grammar. I'll have to think about what better solutions are, but I am quite certain that in any event, posts like the above are simply counterproductive.

I've deleted a few posts. Let's try to stay on topic in this thread. Thanks.
This wasn't a mistake, but it was a temporary ban. Not all bans are permanent, and most of the time we privately message people about their posts instead of publicly doing so. We have a lot of tools at our disposal, not just permanently banning people and forgetting about it. We would much rather people become productive netizens than just excluding them at the first sign of bad behavior.

@Generic_Username, thank you for your thoughtful response to LauraZed's post. Let me address a couple of your suggestions.

On users being able to PM AoPSSheriff:

Since multiple admins act as sheriff, there is no one person who would own and thus be able to check a sheriff PM account. However, the sheriff@aops.com address is linked to all of the appropriate admins' email accounts, so we'll all see a message if it gets sent there. Likewise, admins monitor Site Support, so we will see anything that is posted there.

On the glitch you describe in Site Support:

We do not believe that this particular post was intended as trolling. And even if it was, the post itself was succinct, and an admin responded promptly and then locked the thread. In other words, it never got to the point where it became a nuisance. However, if you do suspect that someone is trolling, please report it to us and we'll look into it.

@phi_ftw1618, you make a good point about sending reminders about spam through posts on the message boards. We agree with you, and we are making an effort to post reminders in threads when appropriate. However, please know that our standards have not changed. As the community has grown, the quantity of spammy posts has grown along with it. And, as rrusczyk notes, we are often delayed in our response to spam because we have to address users who are being mean to spammers first.

You're also right that it's up to both admins and users to maintain the high-quality of the community and teach new users the best way to participate on the message boards. You and other veteran AoPSers can help out in a big way by setting a good example of relevant posting and polite behavior on the forums.

It's not only me that I'm worried about. I have younger siblings, my friends have younger siblings, etc.

True, there may now be a somewhat bigger proportion of younger students now than there were in my middle school to college years. However, note that the AoPS Community is very large overall, so the Prealgebra users certainly don't make up a majority of the users on the website or something like that (I don't think there are many students who have only used Beast Academy who have an account on our website, since we don't have resources aligned to BA on AoPS. We're currently developing Beast Academy Online, but that will be on a different website). And I still really haven't seen a big increase in the proportion of posts that are spam. If there really has been a significant change in the amount of spam that sticks around long enough for you guys to see it as well, it might be for the reason rrusczyk mentioned – we have to deal with mean responses to spam before we can deal with the spam itself (and I have noticed an uptick in that being an issue for us site admins in the last year or so).

If you are concerned about younger users having a good example to follow when they join the site and start in MSM, I would encourage using the strategies that I and other admins+users have mentioned so far – give positive advice, report spam, and make sure your own posts are good.

"quote=BOGTRO: I don't have the time right now to respond to the OP in full, but I wanted to cross-post this because I think it's somewhat important:

I would posit that the post in question is indeed unnecessarily mean, and really doesn't serve much purpose other than to gain brownie points with the "in crowd" by making fun of another user. In other words, it is dangerously close to bullying, assuming the context is that kyzcsurr and First do not know each other particularly well (obviously, among friends the circumstances change significantly).

It is true that this is a relatively minor example, and perhaps relatively harmless, but that's not the point. The point is that the post doesn't achieve anything of value (as it is unreasonable to expect First to take the post as constructive criticism), while simultaneously pronouncing a clear message that incorrect grammar/capitalization/English/etc. is not welcome here. This has the measurable (though in this case, obviously small) effect of driving certain classes of users (e.g. younger users) away, especially when posts like the above are made often, tolerated (if not encouraged), and thus shown to be representative of AoPS culture.

To put it another way, if I were a young user making a post like First's, and received a response like kyzcsurr's, it is far more likely for me to simply stop posting rather than for me to think "wow, that's a really good point about my grammar!". This is more true when larger-scale operations (such as the Globai news forum) are undertaken for the specific purpose of exhibiting how much "better" one user is compared to another. To make this perhaps more relatable: if you were to make your first post on, say, stackoverflow (or any site that is typically frequented by people that are more educated than you are) and were downvoted to oblivion with comments like "perhaps you should go back to high school English before trying to do math", then I suspect you would simply not use stackoverflow anymore rather than undertaking great personal effort to improve your English to academic-level standards.

I understand that many feel driving away younger/low quality users is a desirable outcome (this is especially evident in your statement "the internet might not be the right place for them"), but this is simply an unsustainable approach. Obviously I don't have the data to back this up, but I would posit that most AoPS "community leaders" (so to speak) started at a very young age; at least, that has been my personal experience (for comparison/ego's sake, you're welcome to sift through some of my early posts and take note of how impressively low-quality they are). Driving these people away at an early age would have been disastrous in my opinion.

Essentially, the main issue is that you're attempting to apply mid-high school discussion standards to literal children, many of whom are using discussion platforms for the first time in their lives. Just like it wouldn't make sense for a highly-respected professor to pick apart some of our posts to show to his colleagues, it does not make much sense for a respected high school AoPS community leader to pick apart the posts of our younger members to gain upvotes from other high school students who will click the thumbs-up button for anything that can be described as "savage".

Anyway, the above explains why the post in question is bad, but doesn't help too much with what response would be good. I agree and understand that it is awkward to make a post consisting entirely of a grammar correction and patiently explaining why it is necessary, and you (rightfully) probably do not view this as your responsibility. Indeed, the classical correct course of action is to leave it alone (or report it) and allow the moderator to deal with the situation, but it is true that moderators are often overwhelmed (especially in recent times) and don't always have the time to deal with the more minor issues like grammar. I'll have to think about what better solutions are, but I am quite certain that in any event, posts like the above are simply counterproductive."


I don't think many people realized the importance of this post. AoPS does have bullies. When one person roasts a guy really badly, his group of friends is like "ooh it's cool to pick on this guy now" and will precede to roast him as much as possible, even lame ones. This is because it's now "cool" to roast specific people this causes spam and a thoroughly put out user who probably won't like posting on the forums ever again.

I think bullying should be dealt with more severely

I think forums like The Fun Factory should be deleted. This is really unnecessary.

If you are going to talk about the post where I was bullied, it wasn't the fact of krrusczyk's constructive criticism, that was fine, but the fact that so many people were making fun of me was the bullying aspect and that's what was so mean about the thread.

I just deleted a couple brief posts that seemed about to steer the conversation off topic and/or were verging on an unproductive argument. A couple notes on keeping the conversation productive: When you disagree with someone, try to respond with their username (e.g. "@melschulz") instead of saying "you". Without the context of voice and facial expression, "you" can come across as more aggressive than the poster perhaps intends. Also, try to explain why you disagree in some detail. Short, terse responses can also come across as aggressive. Finally, if you are going to disagree with something, make sure your disagreement is relevant to the topic at hand (the general state of the forums and how to improve the community in general).

Most users here are already doing these things, but just a note for others who may be considering jumping into the discussion.

@Cube1, I know that some users use Fun Factory/Frivolous Forum as study breaks and I think that if it works for them and taking a break like that helps them focus more, that's great. The problem is when someone gets addicted and can't focus on the math. As a compromise, I would say maybe merge them together and make it harder to get to so that a user who just wants to spam can't get to it as easily.

I also just want to point out that there are many, many other ways to relax that may be more productive than spending time on the pink forums. AoPS doesn't necessarily need to have such a feature in one of it's forums.

However, I think the pink forums are quite easy to ignore as they don't show up on the global feed. I understand it is not a great use of people's time, but I don't think there is a reason that it should bother others.

I'm sorry if I was quite unclear in my last couple of posts. What I meant was so that there would be no more forums like Fun Factory and Frivolous Forum.

Also, why does the fun factory and frivolous forum even exist? I mean, it has gotten some people banned, and many don't even contribute to math.

If you really don't trust yourself https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stayfocusd/laankejkbhbdhmipfmgcngdelahlfoji?hl=en and from the looks of it, it seems pretty good (although I haven't tested it).

ProGameXD pointed out what I wanted to say.

Thank you everyone for your feedback. At this point, we have given sufficient time for everyone to put in their two cents, but because this thread has gone off the rails too many times, we have decided to lock it.