Let's stay safe together, people! 👮

Question

EDIT for April 2022:
This thread will be getting phased out over the next month or so. It is not gone yet! You may still add reports, evidence of plagiarized code, and similar here to help us try to keep Sololearn as good a place to be as possible.

Please try to use the reporting function in-app or email Sololearn directly (info at sololearn.com) so the moderators can receive the reports immediately, and we will try to ensure swift and appropriate action.

Thank you all so much.

Answer 1

Hello Stay Safe participants,

While we appreciate your enthusiasm for keeping our community safe, please take the time to READ ALL PRIOR COMMENTS IN THIS THREAD if you plan on making regular use of this thread so that you understand what types of comments and reports this thread is intended to be used for.

Otherwise, we end up making similar reminder announcements every month or so, which starts a discussion about the various nuances of this, that, or the other thing (in-thread chatting) and it seems silly to redirect valuable moderator attention from URGENT reports with maintaining the unnecessary chaos of this thread.

One major thing I want to get out in the open is that it is NOT helpful to be unspecific about what you are reporting. For example,

- "These threads should be mfd," then not saying why but dumping a bunch of links here

- "Inappropriate" is a specific offense type, not a catch-all for content which someone thinks should be moderated

Please be thoughtful here. 🙏🏻

Answer 2

More to the point...

- Code advertising/sharing is highly contextual. If relevant to the context, it seems fine. If not relevant to the context, then it tends toward the off-topic side and if frequently found in not relevant scenarios, then tends toward the spam side.

- The Q&A has the strictest guidelines. It is the the area with the largest surface area of public exposure, so everyone wants to exploit it but no one wants to be bombarded with everyone else's exploits.

- As far as I can tell, there are no guidelines specific to @mentions. If a user feels harassed by them, they have the block feature at their disposal.

Answer 3

Maybe a little history lesson here...

Re: Personally Identifiable Info (PII)

It used to be that we chased down all types of PII and anything that looked like advertising. With the advent of many of these newer features (such as bios and direct messaging), we came to realize that the cards were becoming increasingly stacked against us protecting the community from unintentionally losing their privacy and from scammers.

So... The Content Creation Guidelines explain what constitutes as PII and also has a very specific word in it that has tripped us up for quite some time:

"If you *unintentionally* post personal information in our community, we have the right to remove the post to protect your personally identifiable information."

With guidance from higher up in the chain of command, we have reduced our PII-related interventions to:

- resetting usernames which look like email addresses (assumed "unintentional")

- removing contact info from Q&A (too handy of an excuse for advertising)

I hope this helps!

Answer 4

@Vrintle

- I think SoloLearn is aware of the limitations of using a (very basic) algorithm to determine what is Hot/Trending.

- As far as I can tell, SL's design encourages and rewards something akin to nepotism. Its incentive structure being possibly based upon views, upvotes, followers, timestamps, etc. creates exponential returns for those who take the time to build a strong network and is itself blind to differences in quality, relying on its human participants to provide the discernment. Of course, there is no reward for users demonstrating or applying discernment in the system, so we ultimately have a culture of "I upvote storm you, you upvote storm me". (Not too different from real-world politics.)

- While SL has formed initiatives in the past to attempt to put the spotlight on and showcase quality codes by having staff or moderators submit recommendations, such initiatives ultimately are unsustainable because there is, again, still no reward for demonstrating/applying discernment long term.

Answer 5

Nasif Rahman

We've been pretty good about clearing the reports queue in Discord, so I can only guess that no reports have been filed yet. Since the Stay Safe thread is meant for urgent / particularly egregious cases, we tend to ignore much of what ends up here which fails to meet the thread's scope (just in case someone may have tried to unofficially report stuff related to this user here)... reminding people just gets tiring.

If you want to submit reports to the queue in Discord for each thread with specific offense types so we can issue warnings and mfd as appropriate, we would be happy to take a look at them for you. Sometimes we leave a question alone though if it's not very clear which rule was broken, even if we as mods believe it to be a low-quality question.

I hope this helps.

PS We don't use downvotes as a metric for marking for deletion. Just saying.

Answer 6

Also, there are instructions in the code on "proper submission[s]". Many of you know better by now and still choose to use this thread as a dumping ground for non-urgent reports, moderation questions, and general chatting. There are better places for all of these things. Please be respectful of the moderators who follow this thread by not littering it with garbage and setting off our notifications needlessly.

I hope you understand.

Answer 7

Seriously... I'm tempted to start downvoting all comments in this thread which are off-topic. As a reminder, here are the top 3 (out of 5) acceptable reasons for downvoting, as per the CCGs:

"Here are the cases when the downvote is eligible:

- Posts/answers comments that can be considered as spam

- Incorrect and misleading answers

- Answers/comments that do not match the question"

Please re-read the original post. Here are some things which stand out to me:

1) report harassment /disparagement of others which occurs in moderated areas. (Not applicable to Messages feature -- those go to [e-mail])

2) report *suspected* challenge cheating / multi-account abuse

3) there is a URL to a Code Bit and it describes... A) abusive spam (not occasional spam), B) improper/inappropriate behavior (in the SL policies sense of the term, not your personal feelings of disgust), C) any "crime" (violation of SL policy) which may be urgent or particularly egregious (again, not based on your personal feelings).

Answer 8

The guidelines do not prohibit collection of such data to my knowledge.
But, the terms does list a few interesting points.
> Your use of the Services is subject to the following additional restrictions:
> You represent, warrant, and agree that you will not contribute any Content or User Submission (each of those terms is defined below) or otherwise use the Services or interact with the Services in a manner that:

> a. infringes or violates the intellectual property rights or any other rights of anyone else (including SoloLearn);
> b. violates any law or regulation, including, without limitation, any applicable export control laws, privacy laws or any other purpose not reasonably intended by SoloLearn;

On that note The European GDPR law could be an issue. I would do more research on the subject if needed. leaving A. S. M.

Answer 9

Hi all!
In case it’s helpful, i’ve made a code that has some guidelines and practical how-to on citing sources and ensuring crediting when publishing codes. Just a first iteration, i may expand it more, or make others, depending on what is most helpful.

https://code.sololearn.com/WjKS36hKsCoE/?ref=app

Answer 10

(REPOST)

Someone is disliking all the comments of this code. Idk if that is against the rules or not.
6 downvotes on a single comment, that is disgusting.
https://code.sololearn.com/ca18a106a177/?ref=app

Answer 11

☆ISSA GAUTAM☆
This thread now no more moderated by moderators. Any such malicious intent and harassment cases need to be mailed directly to [e-mail] they will look in the issue and take necessary action over that. Please share your concern with the post and screencaps of the conversation, profile link of that user and sent an mail to sololearn.

Answer 12

T0N1 Don't get this wrong but ChillPill just did what he did with everyone: see a code that's not properly credited? Post it on stay safe.

That is all he did.

It is like an unfunny joke that a user puts another user who's dedicated his time also as a mentor through that, because he can.

One is after their likes and followers, the other shares, teaches, does the not so fun job of warning others. And is continuously insulted because he did what he had to do.

"Sorry folks, I did forget to edit creator's name back in". That was all he needed to say to his followers if he cared about them that much.

To anyone who gets upset over votes:
Please do not let likes and followers go to your head. (I am not saying you did, you obviously aren't)

And let's not have strong opinions about things until we see it for ourselves. Sorry for the conversation here. This is just in response to the fellow user in an effort to let him know there was actually nothing to call Chill out on.

Answer 13

Giving credit is great! And necessary.
But giving credit is not enough to publish someone else’s code.

Copied codes should only be made public when there have been changes made, enhancements added, the code built upon or modified by the new poster in some way.

I am working on something right now to give some basic best practices guidelines around citing your sources for Sololearn, but the short answer is “publishing someone else’s work under your name” isn’t ethical nor allowed here.

Answer 14

Not sure if I can report anything related to challenges 🤔 here.

However, I just saw this person having duplicate account and playing and winning challenges with himself.

https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/24307781/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/24387172/?ref=app

It's a request to investigate further on his accounts!

https://www.sololearn.com/post/1439278/?ref=app

Answer 15

Cheating on challenges.
Main
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/10594543/?ref=app

Fake accounts
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/22882629/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/22098902/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/22567596/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/22878884/?ref=app

Answer 16

Original-:

/WK0pV2nOmVL9/

Copied without credits and claimed the channel his own -:

/WKBknFT1Zy9Q/

Answer 17

https://code.sololearn.com/c0tt048y6Wom/?ref=app

See all his codes, each code got 9-10 upvotes, seems he using 10 spam account,

Answer 18

profanity
/cuPKSs7uwYkp/
Thanks 👍

Answer 19

https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/22721818/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/21441439/?ref=app

This two users are spamming in this code
https://code.sololearn.com/WEVtS9q4FCzQ/?ref=app

Answer 20

Spamming in the DM
A SoloLearn user ( https://www.sololearn.com/Profile/18265805/?ref=app ) has sent unnecessary messages requesting monetary help and saying unnecessary things to one of the SL user.

Here is the screen shot with reference to it
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s-pn0Pko5B0SGvSFeXuTNwZ3pSKg2xx4/view

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rydkt5sx4-PsmpBxpLiyUlt0cz5TKIVd/view?usp=drivesdk

Vaishnavi Kumari please email Sololearn direct as this is involving DM / messaging which is outside of moderation ..

Thanks you for reporting