Saturday, January 7, 2012

Amanda Knox Troublemakers on the JREF Forums

Quite frankly, the mods have really blown it when it comes to the threads discussing the Amanda Knox case on the JREF Forums. There doesn't seem much chance in changing Darat's mind about taking it off moderated status, but one thing does burn me up: Lionking's whinging about the Amanda Knox threads.

He seems obsessed with the people in the thread rather than the case itself. His latest obsession is telling everyone how the participants didn't obey the membership agreement and deserve everything they got. What does he mean by they? In reality Lionking has been highly disruptive in the discussions, and he's gotten off Scot-free.

I crunched some numbers. As of today there are about 72,739 posts in the main threads discussing the Amanda Knox case. This doesn't include threads in Community or Forum Management discussing the discussion of the Amanda Knox case. By my count there are about 1,589 Knox posts tossed into Abandon All Hope, which is where inappropriate posts are sent. That means about 2.14% of the posts [1589/(72739+1589)] were inappropriate.

Is that a bad percentage. No, not really. The thread about mental illness and religion has about 20% of its posts in AAH. That's 10X as bad as the Knox threads. The thread about AA being religious has 3.5% of its posts in AAH or 65% higher than the Knox threads. Neither of them are on moderated status.

Who Are the Problem Children?
I went to the largest thread in AAH about Knox (1,205 posts) and looked at the top 10 culprits. I then looked at all the other Knox threads in AAH and picked a few more members with the highest post counts. I then totaled them up.

Guess who far and away has the highest percentage of his Knox posts in Abandon All Hope? Yep, old Lionking himself. About 17.5% of Lionking's Knox posts have been deemed inappropriate while the thread itself averages about 2% being inappropriate. In other words a Lionking post is over eight times as likely as the average post to be tossed away.

In fact, Lionking has by far the worst percentage of posts tossed to AAH. His two closest competitors, whom he bests by at least 50%, have both been banned from the forums. The next closest person, Pilot Padron, who has been suspended three times, has just 1/3 the rate that Lionking does. Stated another way, about 1 in 6 of Lionking's posts are problematic while about 1 in 20 posts by Pilot are.

Lionking has never been suspended because of the Knox thread. See the chart below.


We can look at the data another way. The more one posts in a thread, the greater the chance of his or her posts ending up in AAH. The "average" member would have about the same percentage of posts left in the threads as tossed into AAH. "Good" members would have a larger percentage left in the thread while "bad" and "disruptive" members would have a larger percentage tossed into AAH.

Let's see how Lionking fares in that regard:

Basically, about 1 in 200 posts in the threads were by Lionking, but about 1 in 25 posts tossed to Abandon All Hope were written by him. Over a hundred people had posts tossed to AAH. So, really, who is he to be whinging about how the participants ruined the thread. In absolute numbers Lionking had the 4th highest number of posts tossed to AAH.

He should apologize for his contributions for invoking the ire of the mods.

1 comment:

  1. Lots of threads are worse than the Knox threads (2.1% in AAH) and don't go moderated status. These threads also don't get all the special rules that the Knox threads have.

    http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=226259
    1300 posts, 2.6% AAH

    http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=194778
    2700 posts, 4.0% in AAH

    http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=202754
    2500 posts, 4.3% in AAH

    http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=219031
    1050 posts, 7.0% AAH

    http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=203566
    4900 posts, 9.0% in AAH

    http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?p=6863187
    377 posts, 25% in AAH

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