If somebody is asking about the Wild Atlantic Way and another user mentions the start and end points - Kinsale in Co Cork and a town in Co Donegal that starts with M and ends with uff - is it appropriate to suspend that user?

Asking for a friend who's a tad, er, miffed by stupid modbots.

Facebook relies on automated admin systems for things like that, it's not unique to FB ... a very long time ago I worked for North Lincs council and their own email system would repeatedly block mails that mentioned the largest town in their catchment area - Scunthorpe.

Your miffed Muffed friend is an unfortunate victim of technology, unfortunately it's part of life these days (especially when said technology is run out of the US, they have funny ideas about naughty words)

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

If it's a septic Flakebook algorithm that allows UK and US election interference, then I'll take my fanny pack and see myself out. A German female friend writing in English recently accidentally had the typo "hoe" in her FB question and got a 7 day ban

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Brighty's website: TheBrightStuffDotCom

CURRENT RR WITH REGULAR UPDATES: The Wife Takes on Chlamydia: A South American Retrospective

If its set up to use Facebook Keywords to reduce spam theres nothing that can be done. But admin can deactivate this function and set their own key words.

Facebook's Admin Assist is garbage compared to active human moderation. The scammers and bots know how to get around the auto systems.

True, but manual moderation is a huge timesink on such a system due to the vast quantity of people and bots. Message boards are the way of the future!

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

Oddly enough you can mention the above town on other pages, as my *cough* friend did on his own travel blog last year, and there's a thread on the HU page yesterday with contributions from several folk fresh out of FB jail who have no idea what they even said wrong. Something's fishy.

You still can't mention baked meatballs of pork and offal wrapped in bacon though.

Turbofurball is bang on with his responses. There is only so much we can do, and when there's 150 - 200 people asking to join in a day, and every one has to manually checked and confirmed, it's a LOT of work for the mods. Could it be better - sure, replace Zuck with me or a 10 year old with morals and it'd be better - but that's not likely to happen. So we live with it.
It's not as if FB jail is permanent or expensive. And we have ours set to two days. A smidgen of patience is all that's needed.

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Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
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Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com

Her responses, but thank you

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

It's not the jail period that miffs me, it's the stupid things that get automodded and result in it. See OP for example. And I just got slammed back in (for three days BTW, not two) for mentioning "J*p Cr*p" in the context of a genuine discussion about the improving standards of Chinese bikes. And yet outright prejudice against entire nations goes unremarked. It's prudish to the point of being completely inappropriate, it has been remarked on by others so it's not just me upset. I like to think I'm an active and constructive contributor but this does nothing to encourage it.

The problem there is that "Jap" has been used as a racist term in the past, even if you didn't mean it like that ... it's comparatively easy to parse data through a filter for certain words yet far far harder to pick up on complex language that can be truly offensive.

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FreeBSD fan since before it was cool ...

Without human moderators who genuinely know stuff and who behave fairly, and especially consistently, no information source can survive. The first line AI that's used is only as good as the ability of who has fed it key words that aren't ok. When the old guys take their bat and ball home, all you've got left is newbies, spammers and charlatans.

PS. If the algorithm allegedly only issues 2 day bans, it must have been a human FB HU mod who once gave me 30

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Brighty's website: TheBrightStuffDotCom

CURRENT RR WITH REGULAR UPDATES: The Wife Takes on Chlamydia: A South American Retrospective

Facebook's Admin Assist functions can simply block posts and comments with keywords in, subsequent bans or suspensions are determined in the settings by group admin. It can also be set up with rules to manage membership requests.

It can be a help but is not an effective replacement for good human admin.

Did you use the asterisks in your discussion or was it the full fat version that got you in trouble? I also belong to the Vintage Japanese Motorcycle Club (all of my bikes are vintage by their definition ) and we get our knuckles rapped not only by the Facebook police bots but also by the real life page mods if we use the contraction. Sometime last year the editor of the club magazine did an editorial about how 'offensive' the contraction was but it didn't really come across as that convincing.

I think most people put up with these idiot restrictions in the belief that at some other level it does have a purpose but eventually get annoyed by them to the point where they vote with their feet and leave. There's a spectrum of travel where people find it 'magical' to begin with, functional after a while, and more trouble than it's worth eventually. The way extra security and more restrictive oversight has piled up over the years will be their eventual downfall - in my opinion anyway. Not just yet, but in time. The stuff you get there has to be worth the time you invest and already I find little of interest on the HU Facebook pages. Here, despite its much lower footfall, has more to offer. This from someone who's just spent all morning trying to access his bank account on line because of security issues. It would have been much quicker to go to the local branch, except it's been shut down.

It was the "full fat" version, but given that expressions like the above and the name of the town in Ireland are hardly offensive I didn't think to use asterisks. Everybody knows what the words are so it's a bit pointless, quite frankly. There are some stronger terms I naturally wouldn't use but in this case I feel like the censorship bar has been set so low it's insulting to any reasonable level of intelligence.

I do sympathise with Grant's plight though. Having been an admin of a group with a fair number of younger riders in the past, I know language and views can be a bit... industrial. The challenge is to keep people involved without letting them get in others' faces. The art of successful moderation is, dare I say it, moderation.

I'd LOVE to have someone supply the PERFECT keywords list.
A LOT of the issue is country of origin - words in A are NOT acceptable in B etc.
Case in point: "fanny pack" in North America is perfectly normal and acceptable as a name for a waist pack. I was mortified to discover what it meant in UK. How do you moderate that?

MUFF: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what%27s+a...=v320-1&ia=web

Yes it clearly has other meanings, but again, how to you moderate that?
I'd accept both words without thinking about it, (and unthinkingly offend someone in the UK) but it's impossible for me and every other moderator to read every single post - especially without duplicating the effort. We MUST rely on automation. Yup, you'll get bit on occasion. IF I could do it all better, trust me I would.
What's that old phrase? "Grin and bear it".

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Grant Johnson
Seek, and ye shall find.
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Inspiring, Informing and Connecting travellers since 1997!
www.HorizonsUnlimited.com