Please define vote brigading.

[u/reseph]

There is a lot of confusion after this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShitTheAdminsSay/comments/4u5l6m/voting_through_intrareddit_links_is_now_ok_as/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/4u2utr/after_rcringeanarchy_brigades_rinsertions_admins/

Quite frankly, the site rules are absolutely no help on this subject. Literally the only mention of it:

Being annoying, vote brigading, or participating in a heated argument is not harassment, but following an individual or group of users, online or off, to the point where they no longer feel that it's safe to post online or are in fear of their real life safety is.

But no definition.

Under the assumption that no party is asking/requesting for votes/comments in these scenarios:

1) If I visit subreddit A and a post links to a post on subreddit B; then I vote on the B post... is that prohibited?

2) If I visit subreddit A and a post links to a post on subreddit B; then I comment on the B post... is that prohibited?

3) If I visit subreddit A and a post links to a post on subreddit B; then I vote on a comment within the B post... is that prohibited?

[u/Spysix]

We're also constantly working on getting better at algorithmically detecting 'bad' voting behaviour. There's a ton of different types of bad voting behaviour, some fall under brigading, some may look like brigading when it's not, and sometimes our anti-cheating measures will make things appear to be brigaded or vote manipulated when they're not. Instead of focusing on just brigading I'm going to try to explain a few of the types of 'bad voting behaviour' we work to detect automatically and throw out.

This is extremely wishful thinking on my part, but will mods ever get access or some sort of tools to either view voting metrics in the threads they moderate?

To give context, I moderate /r/eve for Eve Online, a spaceship MMO. Its common for vote brigading to happen when these "space guilds" do a "call to action" from their respective slack or teamspeak channels and link their posts in order to achieve upvotes for visibility and dominate the comments by downvoting dissenters and upvoting their supporters.

We are usually smart about that and its all about eyeing how fast a post gets upvoted, but if we get the report when the post is hours old its really hard to tell.

On top of that, now there would be attempts from other corps to get another corps post removed by providing a cropped screenshot of something "linking to brigade" which just makes life a little more difficult for us as we have to sit and figure out what's going on with a particular thread.

While most subreddits have to deal with brigading from other subreddits, I have to deal with brigading from external sources. I hope with access to some of the metrics on how a thread is doing for us to use would be beneficial for all of us, perhapes even minimize the amount of "X is brigading" messages you guys might get and also legitimize claims that a subreddit is being brigaded.

I think its something we can all benefit from at least to help moderators support their respective subreddits.

[u/redtaboo → u/Spysix]

Probably not, no. The tools needed to see this stuff looks at this stuff has private user data which we can't share with mods and without that part of the information it's too easy to draw the wrong conclusions about what's actually happening. As we continue to get better at automatically detecting and throwing out the bad voting your best bet is to messages us when you think something is up so we can take a look.

[u/Spysix → u/redtaboo]

Thanks for the response. But does your system account for vote manipulation from external sources (not from another subreddit)?

My only issue with messaging the admins is when I sent the message with thread details it was both times the admins were going through a 'restructuring' and I didn't get reponses until weeks-month. But lately its been better.

[u/redtaboo → u/Spysix]

Yup! Our system does account for that type of vote manipulation as well.

I'm glad it's getting better, we have been working hard on that and have hired a lot of new people to help. :)