It's been a long time coming, but we have found some time and resources to work on the review mod tools! Now that we have both Ross and Liljim doing all our back end programming, they each have more time to work on more things. While they have both been very busy with the redesign, Ross was able to spend some time improving the review mod tools. Review mods can now set bans like they do on the forums, that expire automatically. This means a review mod can ban a user who submits a rule breaking review from 2-30 days. Most bans will probably be short if it's a basic offenses, but repeat offenders beware!
In addition, a copy of your rule breaking review and a ban reason from the mod will be automatically sent to your PM inbox! We are trying hard to make the site more fair, and fun, for everyone involved. We hope this improvement in communication makes things easier on those getting banned. In the past they would typically email me, or others, asking why they were banned. Now they will know why they were banned and won't have to inquire about their ban.
There may be a lot more bans being handed out howerver. The mods would often hold back on banning users for small offenses because they knew they maybe sentancing them to a 2-3 month ban, or longer. Now they can give a 2-3 day ban if they feel it's a small offense, but it lets the user know they did something wrong and they can hopefully learn from the mistake.
Also review mods can now delete reviews that are within a certain time frame (they can't delete older reviews) and they can delete reviews that are flagged as abusive, or clear flags from reviews that aren't abusive.
All of this will hopefully greatly clean up the Newgrounds review system. It may take a few weeks for them to catch up on some of the backed up crap, but eventually we will hopefully get on top of all the bad reviews. More review mods will probably be added. (Don't ask to be one as they are nominated).
So if you're not a review mod, how can you help? Flag those abusive reviews! We have increased the power of user whistles! The system we had gave the top power to the user with the most whistle points, and users with less whistle points had less power, but as the top user moved higher up, the majority of the users far behind got less and less power. We have changed that to a fixed scale so now all users wiith positive whistle points will have more power than they did before.
On the other hand we increased the penalty for users who use the abusive flag to flag legit reviews that aren't abusive. Don't worry to much, everyone has been doing a great job. If you think a review is abusive and understand our review rules, it's probably an abusive review. We're talking about users who know a review isn't abusive, but flag it anyway. When the review mods see these legit reviews showing up in their list they will clear these bogus flags, and the users behind them will get negative whistle points. If a user gets to many negative points their whistle becomes useless until they build their points back up by flagging truely abusive reviews.
So get out there and flag those abusive reviews! We really want to put the lid on users who leave reviews insulting the author. So if you see a reviewer insulting the author, rather than the Flash, flag the review as abusive!
