[Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter

Thu Sep 22 13:46:54 UTC 2011

Bjoern has pointed out a flaw in that some filterers might get trigger
happy, but that can be resolved by giving people the option when they decide
to click on an image A not to filter that image in future and B to disregard
everything else filtered out by the person who thought that image
problematic. We could also slightly complicate the system by splitting
option 3 into a cautious and a very cautious button - very cautious filters
anything that any other filterer thought problematic, and cautious ignores
filterers who have often been ignored by other filterers.

I would have thought that a Bot trawling all images to see which have been
objected to by somebody would probably be blocked as a denial of service
attack, afterall how many readers actually read more than 100,000 articles a
year?

Re Stephen Bain's point re Flickr, I raised Flickr in a previous thread as
proof that whether or not this is theoretically possible it has been done in
practice. Fae then criticised the way Flickr operates its filters, hence my
design which I hope would work and I believe would avoid the problems we
would have in using the Flickr approach.

Re Andrew's point re readers on blocked IPs, we have ways of creating
accounts for people who are caught up by IP range blocks.  If the overlap
between readers wanting to create an account in order to filter images and
readers caught up in IP range blocks  becomes excessive then we could
probably create a filter only account for them.

I'm uncomfortable about a session cookie based system for IP readers, many
of our readers are in Internet Cafes and I'm not sure if PCs in those sorts
of environments get rebooted and the session cookies wiped between
customers.

WereSpielChequers

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 6
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:44:09 +0200
> From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi at gmx.net>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <1c7m771u12n25l5tdkdcafdo1kvf49sm79 at hive.bjoern.hoehrmann.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> * WereSpielChequers wrote:
> >For obvious reasons we don't want a system that creates a publicly
> available
> >set of filters that net nannies of various descriptions could use to stop
> >other people from seeing things that they deemed inappropriate.
>
> This cannot be prevented. You just need a bot that emulates a reader who
> has the desired filter settings enabled and then load all the images or
> articles or whatever and check what is blocked and then you have a list.
>
> >   1. Hide all images and just show caption and description. (recommended
> >   for users with slow internet connections)
>
> (I note that it's trivial to blur images on the client side and reveal
> them on hover or tapping or whatever input method would be appropriate.)
>
> >   3. Show all images except ones that I or another editor have decided
> not
> >   to see again
>
> This will not work unless you introduce some process to block editors
> who put too much on their filter list for some definition of "too much".
> --
> Bj?rn H?hrmann ? mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de ? http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
> Am Badedeich 7 ? Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 ? http://www.bjoernsworld.de
> 25899 Dageb?ll ? PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 ? http://www.websitedev.de/
>
>
>
> Message: 9
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 22:08:45 +1000
> From: Stephen Bain <stephen.bain at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAO5b2fv=85w2wJa9nsFFGFoXicHgL_1BEq+gL8QtR2jPMTh1Wg at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 9:19 PM, WereSpielChequers
> <werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > One of the objections is that we don't want a Flickr style system which
> > involves images being deleted, accounts being suspended and the burden of
> > filtering being put on the uploader.
>
> When have any of those things been part of the proposal?
>
> --
> Stephen Bain
> stephen.bain at gmail.com
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 10
> Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:16:16 +0100
> From: Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] A possible solution for the image filter
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>        <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <CAE4f==fnQ2R59zUkwDMrQ_kA8t8Xubyzcw=bwcBaTMet_NkudA at mail.gmail.com
> >
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> On 22 September 2011 12:23, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 22 September 2011 12:19, WereSpielChequers
> > <werespielchequers at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> So is there a simpler way to do this, is there some flaw in this that
> would
> >> prevent it working, or is this the flying unicorn option?
> >
> > I believe it was envisioned as working for anonymous casual readers as
> well.
> >
> > There *should* be some way to at least have the no-images option for
> > anonymous readers without ruining caching ...
>
> Cookies? It would work on at least a per-session basis, I'd think.
>
> One issue here is that if we make it registered-user-only we need to
> work out how this interacts with account creation - and IP blocks. It
> clearly will cause problems if people *want* to turn on the filter, go
> to create an account, and discover one of our famed cryptic block
> messages telling them they can't...
>
> --
> - Andrew Gray
> ? andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
>
>
>
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