IF YOU'RE A REGULAR USER AND WANT TO KNOW WHY YOUR PICTURE OR PROFILE WAS (OR IS LIKELY TO BE) DELETED:

The most important thing to know about flagging and Flagmod is the list of rules: There IS no list of rules, and there likely never will be. Despite persistent requests, the OKAdministrators adamantly refuse to issue any firm, specific guidelines about what is & is not appropriate content for the site. Apparently their goal is to rule with a loose grasp and allow the place to run by majority-rule; instead of edicts being handed down from on high, you are tried by a jury of your peers. The upshot of this is that flagging and Flagmod are fairly arbitrary: Anyone can flag anything you do, and whether or not it gets passed on to the OKAdmins for deletion depends wholly on the personal opinion of whatever Flagmodders happen to be the first people to vote on it. Sometimes, the OKAdmins will issue a "rule change," such as when they reversed the popularly-held "one user, one profile" guideline by making an official proclamation that it was now OK to have a single profile for 2 people (usually a married couple seeking a threesome). So while divine intervention does occur, it is unusual, and limited in its scope. Flagging and Flagmod are both driven almost entirely by personal judgement, so if you're concerned about what, specifically, might be cause for deletion, you might want to skip the next 4 paragraphs.

A close second in importance is about message flags. If you wish to flag an offending message that somebody sent to you, do not reply to that message. In Flagmod, all Message flags are seriously screwed up: Flagging a message does NOT flag that specific message, it flags the very last message sent in that thread. So if some troll sends you a harassing email, and you flag it and tell him to fuck off, we in Flagmod will NOT be able to read what he wrote--all we can see is your reply. This situation has gone on for months now, despite many pleas to fix it, and so it is expected to persist for many months more.

Next up is about picture flags. In Flagmod, we get TONS of flagged pictures when it's really the entire profile that should be deleted, and likewise tons of flagged profiles that have nothing wrong with them except the picture(s). So, flaggers: Flag a picture only if you feel that that specific picture is invalid, but the profile itself seems legitimate. Don't flag somebody's profile simply because she's chosen to crop out her face from all of her pictures. Likewise, if you feel the entire profile is fake, flag the profile, not the pictures: All the pictures will disappear automatically when the profile is deleted. So if some spambot is using 10 pictures of Lindsay Lohan, there's no need to make us Flagmodders go through 10 irrelevant picture flags when it's the profile itself that needs to die.

The next most important thing to know is that Flagmod does not actually delete anything. If enough Flagmodders vote D(elete) on something, it passes to the attention of the OKAdmins, or at least their interns. THEY do the actual deleting.

The last note in this half of my Flagmod post (partially because it belongs in both halves) is about the IP Banhammer that OKCupid uses to permanently deny all site access to incorrigible trolls / perverts / sexual predators / what-have-you. The banhammer note is this: Apparently, there IS no banhammer. Despite the bounty of Persistent Penis Posters (who think that OKCupid is the ideal place to showcase photographs of their genitals, and then replace the offending pictures after they get deleted), and the endless stream of forum trolls and sock-puppets like BobbyBiggs, I have never heard of a single user (or IP address) being banned from visiting the site, even temporarily. Evidently the OKAdmins would rather crunch numbers (which I don't begrudge them) than exercise this bit of site maintenance (which I kinda do).

IF YOU'RE A FELLOW FLAGMODDER:

As I said above, Flagmod is abitrary, and subject to the personal taste of each individual Flagmodder. So the following are merely my guidelines, not a hard-&-fast ruleset to be taken as gospel by everyone.

By far, the most important question about every flag is this: Is this a bot? Here's a list of common bot traits--if a profile displays too many of them, or even just a couple (or even just 1) of the top ones, I always Delete the profile with extreme prejudice.

• The pictures are (almost certainly) of different people, yet the profile implies that they are all the same user (them).
• The pictures are of a celebrity, model, porn star, etc. (the website Tineye.com is a great help in identifying pictures), and again, the profile claims that they are of the actual user.
• The pictures have damning Tineye hits. A Tineye link to a place like Flickr or a personal blog is not damning: People have every right to post pics of themselves on more than one website. But if the Tineye link leads to a place like WhatBoysWant.com, or some "Post pictures of random hot girls" thread, that's damned all to hell.
• Googling random snippets of profile text (sections that say something unusual or misspelled are usually the best bets) produces exact matches from elsewhere on the web. Most bots don't write their own text, it's usually copy-pasted many times.
• They offer to tell you where to find "sexyer" pics, or see them on cam.
• The pictures are of a hot girl with big tits, in her underwear. Real girls will post pictures of themselves in swimwear, usually at a beach or pool. Bots use pictures of girls in their underwear, usually making a dumb-looking kissy-face at their bedroom or bathroom mirror.
• The profile includes offsite contact information, especially if that information is disguised. Some real users will do this, usually in their "What I'm Doing With My Life" section: Since they're talking about what they do for a living, it's all right for them to provide a link to their band's MySpace page, or say that they're a professional jeweler and give the address of their website where you can check out their earrings. But if these offsite links occur repeatedly, or in parts of the profile that make no sense (e.g., "Most Private Thing I'm Willing To Admit: www.merrillynch.com"), then they're almost certainly a spambot, using OKCupid to advertise a commercial good/service for financial gain. Likewise, anyone who claims that "I'm hardly ever on here, the best way to contact me is at my personal email" at some yahoo, gmail, or msn address is guaranteed to be a scammer. That goes double if they try to slip the address past filters (e.g., "flirtysamantha at yah who dat cumm").
• The profile itself might look legitimate, but its Journal section is pure advertisement for some commercial good or service.
• The profile has message flags from multiple users. Even if you can't see the message itself, a profile that gets message flags from 4 different users (especially with comments like "sent me spam" or "asked me to write to a yahoo address") in 2 days is guaranteed to be a bot.
• The profile is writing to people that the real person it's trying to be would have no interest in. When the smokin' hot 22-year-old female sends a message to the fat, balding 53-year-old, your spambot sense should be tingling. Multiply the bot factor by 10 for each of the following: The recipient is a 0% Match (because the bot hasn't answered any questions), the recipient lives more than 25 miles away, and the bot sends these messages immediately after creating the profile.
• The profile text appears to have been written by more than one person. Bots frequently grab their copypasta from different sources, to be less recognizable, but this backfires when one section of the profile is written like "so don b hatin cuz i aint no bitch, wat makz u think i care. guess im just 2 gud 4 u" and another section says that the user values intelligent communication. Now, it's possible that one user allowed another user to edit a part of their profile, but when this happens, the edits are labeled on the host profile (or at least they used to be).
• One or more of the pictures is a thumbnail image, or an image that used to be a thumbnail before it was blown back up to be a low-resolution version at close to its original dimensions. Real users have the original, full-size pictures of themselves; bots use whatever images that they have on hand, especially the thumbnails of hot chicks that are so commonly seen on advertisements.
• The profile is too enticing. Usernames like "flirtysamantha4u", 3-adjectives like "I am sexy, naughty, and hot", and profiles where every single text section is about sex, are almost always pornbots. Be careful: Some real users are in fact using OKCupid for casual sex hookups and that's it, and that is indeed a valid use, so use discretion here.
• Sections of profile text are repeated in more than one section of the profile, and/or have no relevance to the actual writing prompt. These occur when the bot (or its author) gets to the prompt and doesn't know how to answer, so it just drops in another chunk of copypasta and hopes for the best, resulting in profiles that read like "Six Things I Could Never Do Without: I'm new to this whole internet dating thing so go easy on me. I'm a sweet, caring woman who wants to find a good, supportive man, etc."
• The profile claims a race of Native American, but the picture(s) show their ancestry to be anything but. Many bots are written by people who don't speak English that well, and some of those people think that "Native American" means "legal citizen of the U.S." Which gives us a laugh, and also an easy reason to D the profile.
• The profile is written in horrible English, AND specifies that they speak English fluently, or as their only language. OKCupid has members from around the world, and we definitely aren't biased against poor English skills. It's only when some near-illiterate claims to be a 60-year-old Social Studies teacher in Michigan that we say, "Yeah, that's a bot."
• The profile was flagged (or voted D on) by either Nomadic-Photog, or myself. In my experience, Nomadic was wrong about a flag once. ONCE.
• Scammer grammar: The profile consists of vague, bland, positive words that, in the end, don't mean much of anything at all. "I'm a free spirit who wants to find my perfect soul mate in this large and confusing world. I'm independent, loving, kind, loyal, giving, and special. I love a good sense of humor and an ear for music. Life is too short and I want to live it to the fullest! If you seek honesty, talk to me and you will find it. I have had fun in my past, and seek happiness in my future. I love a gorgeous smile. Pair that up with beautiful eyes and you will melt my heart pretty quick!" ANYBODY could say that, which is why scammers use it so often: Sure, it's meaningless tripe, but it's plausible meaningless tripe, so it's likely better than anything that the scammer could write himself. Did you notice that the text didn't even imply a gender for either the speaker or his/her hypothetical soul mate?
• Scammer spacing/punctuation: Another common bot trait, this is when the space between words falls on the wrong side of the punctuation mark ,or on both sides , but usually there's no space at all.This might occur because the copy-paste system gets errors when there's a punctuation mark, or because the scammer never learned what the heck punctuation is for--either way, it's an easily-identifiable red flag and I love it. Be careful, though: One or two typos don't count as scammer punctuation, and even when it's all through the profile there could still be a real user behind it, dropping the space after each punctuation mark simply because it's logical to save a keystroke.
• Scammer capitalization: Some bots Like to capitalize words That otherwise would not be capitalized. Capitalizing Every Word Might Simply Be A Stylistic Choice, and if it's just the Nouns and the User speaks German then it might be sheer Force of Habit, but when it's Apparently random it's Probably because the scammer is Not an English speaker, and knows that We capitalize a lot of things Like place names.
• The profile claims that the user is male, in his 40s or 50s, works as an engineer of some sort, and has 1 child--the mother is usually deceased. Seriously, we get a load of these.

If any profile displays more than 3 of these, or any 1 of the first 10, it wins an immediate D from me. These are the easy warning signs that a profile is a bot, and if you have trouble recognizing them, you shouldn't be trying to Flagmod. There are other indicators, usually in the form of contradictions within the profile (e.g., the user claims to have lived in Canada their whole life, but they can't speak French, or they mention their daughter in one part of the profile, then say that their only child is a boy in another part), but these vary too much to try to list them here.

PICTURE RULES--Again, there are no rules. But this is how I roll, personally:

• The picture must be a photograph of you. If you really want to post a picture of your dog, or your car, or your kid, or whatever, is it really so difficult to get in the picture with them? What a beautiful sunset, or waterfall, or golf course! Hand the camera to somebody else, or use the timer.
• The picture must include EITHER enough of your face to be recognizable, OR enough of your torso to be informative of your general body shape. "Face shots" that just have your mouth and chin are deleted. "Face shots" that have most of your face covered by your hair are deleted. "Body shots" that show less than 75% of your torso are deleted. "Body shots" that are just a Myspace angle of your legs and feet (seriously, lots of people do this) are deleted. "Body shots" that really don't show anything but your tattoo are deleted: We judge tattoo pics by what the picture would show if the tattoo were not there, and if it's on your arm, all it is is a picture of an arm--Delete. Pictures that show only silhouettes (such as your shadow) might count as body shots, depending on how clearly your outline is defined.
• The picture must not show female nipples, or any genitalia. For a concrete example of just how feeble the "official OKCupid rules" are, consider the current photo-uploads page, where all it says on the subject is "No full nudity." A while back, Flagmod was graced by an image of a guy whose head and body were encased in a horse costume which covered everything except his erect penis. Now, by the letter of the law, I would have had to LA that image, as the man was clearly not fully nude. But fuck the letter of the law, the only rule that most of Flagmod seems to care about is that all images that include naughty bits WILL be deleted. Some people are more strict than this, and will vote D on images like a fat guy wearing a thong, because the image is "gross." Me, I try to be egalitarian--if the beautiful people can post pics of themselves in their skimpy-scanties, I say the ugly ones can too. But if some guy's underwear is semi-transparent, or so tight that you can see details around his penis, I'll D it for coming too close to the nudity rule.
• Using Photoshop or other image editors is allowed, as long as you don't alter your face beyond the point of recognition, or produce images that seem intended to decieve. And please stop using that stupid Andy Warhol filter. MAN, that shit gets old.
• Again, the image must be a photograph. Drawings, paintings, computer-generated images, and all other non-photographic media are not allowed. Even if it's a highly accurate self-portrait, it's still verboten.
• If there are people other than you in the picture, it's best to use the picture's caption to specify which one you are, especially if we can't use your other pictures to help figure it out.
• Your pictures should be recent--at least, no more than a few years old, and certainly not from when you were a kid. Different Flagmodders might have different rules on whether a 19-20 year-old might be allowed to use pictures from when they were 15-16.
• I am not the only Flagmod that is willing to be lenient and vote LA on a technically invalid image or two if the user also has other, valid, pics up. Suppose you built a totally awesome Iron Man costume for Halloween, and used a head-&-shoulders shot of that as your picture. Such an image would not show your face at all, or anywhere near enough of your torso, but I might still LA (Leave Alone) it if you had other pictures that did a good job of showing your face/body. But, in order to win an LA from me, the invalid picture in question would have to impress me as being sufficiently cool, funny, interesting, or informative enough--in short, is OKCupid a better website for including this picture. As for the Iron Man costume, even though it doesn't show your physical form, it's a great demonstration of your comic-book-geek nature and your skill at working metal / plastic / whatever, so it's actually more illustrative than another regular headshot, similar to the one(s) you already have up.
• Even if an image fails to comply with one or more of the above rules, you can still have it on your OKCupid profile--just not in the Photos section. If you have third-party image hosting, on Photobucket or some such place, you can put the pictures there and then link to them in your OKCupid Journal. Alternatively, use an editing program to combine 2 images: A picture of your car, side-by-side with a picture of you sitting in your car, all in the same image. Or a picture of your artwork, with a shot of your face inset into a corner of the frame. Many technically invalid images can be saved by combining them with a valid one, yet sadly very few people do this.
• Dear flaggers, dear Flagmodders, kindly learn what the term "ecu" means. ECU is an acronym that stands for "Extreme Close-Up." It is used when the subject of the photograph is no more than 2 or 3 inches square, or the camera is so close that you can't even be sure what you're looking at. It is not to be used to mean "this is kinda out of focus," or "this is a bad picture." A picture of somebody's eye is an ECU. A picture of a hand might be an ECU. A picture of the back of somebody's upper arm might be a CU, but it is not an ECU. A picture taken at an extreme angle so that you're looking straight down the front of their body, from chest to toes, is not an ECU.
• If the flagged image gives credence to the idea that the profile itself is a bot, you should ALWAYS vote LA on the image so that it continues to provide evidence against the profile. I've seen countless profiles that have image flags, but no images: They might have shown nudity, they might have been of a recognizable celebrity or porn model, etc., but I couldn't tell because the picture was gone. Note: Deleting a bot's invalid pictures does not magically transform the bot into a real, living, human user.

 

Other notes: Each user is allowed a maximum of ONE profile; sock-puppets are deleted, usually without mercy. Users are allowed to be as rude/offensive as they want to on their own profiles, it's only when they force themselves on other users via mail, IM, or on the forums that they become flagworthy trolls. I usually vote CT on forum flags, because trying to encourage (or enforce) good behavior in the forums is pretty much an exercise in futility. Those who aggressively and/or repeatedly pollute the forums with bile, spamflooding, or whatever, are at just as much risk of having their profiles deleted as those who insist on harassing other users with rude, insulting, or otherwise offensive emails or IMs. There are many joke profiles; most are halfhearted efforts, just some random sentences that are obviously lies and a few pictures off the web, usually demotivational posters or pictures of people with birth defects. These pathetic attempts are deleted pretty much immediately, but sometimes I'll come across a joke profile that I think is actually funny / interesting / well-written enough to actually be a net benefit to the quality of OKCupid in general, and in these rare cases I'll vote LA on the profile no matter how fake it obviously is.

I'm sure I missed some things, but that's what the Edit function is for. Let me know if there's anything you feel I left out.

Last week, I had over 1000 Rejected Quiver matches. I tend to reject all Quiver matches on general principle, as it doesn't show you anyone you wouldn't see anyway in a regular Match Search, which of course has far better search parameters. So Quiver is essentially a third-grader's book report on the novel you just read--potentially interesting, but not much real weight to it, so why bother?

Today, I see that I have only 890 Rejected matches. This happened once before, when the whole site went through an "upgrade." Of course, we've just had another such upgrade, only a few days ago. So, the options are:

1) OKCupid has better things to do than keep track of the names of the 1000+ people I've said I don't like,

2) Every time the look of the front page changes, some less-important data gets lost in the shuffle, or

3) The OKCupid admins are trying to make me think I don't despise Quiver as much as I actually do.

Hmmmmm.

If this journal post pops up on your homepage, please stalk me. My last post drew 8 visitors . . . none of whom were within 1000 miles of me, so I'm wondering if OKCupid has a screw loose and thinks that "Bellingham, Washington" is actually over on the eastern seaboard of the United States. So this post is actually more like a proximity survey. Thanks.

I just got some mail telling me that another user & I rated each others' profiles at 4 or 5 stars. This was the first such mail I've gotten in . . . months, easily. Since I usually leave a rating on most (girl's) profiles that I read, and a healthy chunk of those are 4s or 5s, that leaves me to deduce . . . that as far as profile appeal goes, I must suck pretty hardcore.

Possible cop-outs:
Maybe people only get as far as the fact that my current thumbnail is a pumpkin.
Maybe they scroll down to see how much I've written, and are intimidated by the wall of text.
Maybe they see that I'm currently unemployed, and write me off as a total loser.
Maybe they look over my "If You Are My Ideal Mate" section and interpret my wish list as if it were a table of absolute requirements.

Who knows, maybe it's time for a reboot. Maybe this time, I'll get Christian Bale to play me, that should work.

Would you be comfortable marrying a bisexual person Yes No I'm Not Sure

If we're being honest with ourselves here (and what else are these questions for, really), I wouldn't be comfortable marrying anyone, because you don't marry someone in order to be "comfortable," you marry them because you couldn't imagine life being livable any other way. If you're getting married, someone asks you how you feel, and your reply is "comfortable," there's something very wrong with you. It's a minor semantic quibble, I admit, I guess I'm just nitpicky today.

Constructive Criticism: The question would be better worded as, "How would you feel about marrying a bisexual person?" with options of "That sounds great!" "I wouldn't mind." "I could put up with it." and "I would never do that."

Normally, I shy away from these--If people are going to choose something, let it be by merit, not the quality of the advertising. But this one is so damn good, I think I'd promote it even if I didn't agree with it.

--> Wassup 2008 <--

It's worth a viewing. Trust me.

This is the second time in my life I've actually Blocked a real person. The first was a couple of years ago; Some 50ish woman, who was about 800 miles away from and roughly a 40% Match with me, IMed me because she wanted me to entertain her. She had no ideas for a topic of conversation, and her replies were monosyllabic. Sorry, but I had better things to do that night, and I didn't want to be interrupted again.

The second . . . well, to be honest, I'm not actually sure if she's an actual human or not. The first contact I had with her was about 3 weeks ago, when she sent me this:

Subject: hi your hot
Body: I check out ya profile and was woundering if you can look at mine and if you like it or not let me know.

Given that her location was in my city, I felt obligated to respond. I replied that she probably actually hadn't checked out mah profile, because she would have seen that I prefer correct spelling & that kind of stuff, and also because you should probably direct "hi your hot" only toward people who are . . . you know . . . hot. But I thanked her for her form letter, and gave her some polite constructive criticism on her profile, saying that she might want to update where she claims to be both lesbian and bisexual, and live in both Bellingham and Blaine.

This morning, I found this:

Subject: hey send me a message
Body: I already saw ya profile. do you like my profile? send me a message ok rather you like mine or not.

Yeah, I think that deserves a Block. And I notice that she still hasn't corrected her profile.

So, OKCupiders: What are your feelings on Blocking people? Obviously, spambots and those who open with "hey wanna cyber" should be shot on sight, but what standards do you have on killing an actual conversation (however lame it might be) before it can even begin?

Alternatively, whatcha doin' for Halloween?

That's right! The United States Department of Health and Human Services, which is an arm of the federal government, has apparently joined forces with the Religious Right and announced the following inexplicable claims:

1) All health-care providers that recieve any federal funding, and all individuals who work for such providers, now have the right to deny any patient's request for an abortion. They cannot be sued for this denial; they would be federally protected.
2) In case you're confused by the many definitions of what precisely constitutes "abortion," the wording of the proposal allows the medical facility or its employee to write in their own interpretation of what the word means: "the conscience of the individual or [medical] institution should be paramount in determining what constitutes abortion."
3) According to the terms of the proposal just put forth (yes, by the Department of Health & Human Services), almost ALL forms of contraception that operate inside the woman's body (birth control pills, IUDs, "morning-after" pills, etc.) would now be classified as having an ABORTION. Yes, you read that correctly, The Pill = Abortion. Why? Because these methods (have at least a theoretical chance to) prevent a newly-fertilized egg from developing further. According to the proposal, any method that could be employed to have an effect after the moment of fertilization is now equivalent to the termination of a pregnancy, even in the case of birth-control methods that are almost purely preventive in nature, such as The Pill. It doesn't really matter that this argument has no basis in medical science--we're talking about LAW here, not SCIENCE. No mention is made of surgical or barrier-type contraceptives, so presumably condoms, diaphragms, vasectomies, and tubal ligations are still good . . . for now.

Don't believe me? Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cristina-page/hhs-moves-to-define-contr_b_112887.html



ALL YOUR UTERUS ARE BELONG TO US
YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO CONTROL MAKE YOUR BABIES

Well, here it is Sunday again . . . high time you got yourself some churchin' up!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M-IarIHlTw

For whatever idiotic reason (but most likely because it's 11:19 pm and I have to go to work tomorrow), I have decided that you could use a dose of amiable silly before you go to bed. Comes recommended by ME, and really what higher authority could you possibly want?

World of Warcraft -- Amish Paradise