NOTE: There is no TL;DR. There never will be a TL;DR. Read all of it (especially the links), or don't read it at all. Only knowing bits of the story when it comes to the whistle system is what causes people to lose their whistles. You have been warned; it's not my fault you were too lazy to read all of it and went incorrectly flagging things no-one told you were abusive. Whining at me will get you nowhere.

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As many people know, Rage's thread was designed to give users the chance to up their whistle level, while helping the review mods get rid of all the review abuse from before the whistle system was implemented. While it proved a valuable resource for mods and regulars alike, it eventually became the victim of its own popularity, and was flooded with inaccurate judgements on what should and shouldn't be whistled, and because of the persistant headache it caused the review mod team, in the end it was locked.

There have since been a few attempts to re-create or copy the thread by users in the hope of getting links to "free whistle points". So far, they have all either fallen into obscurity, or been removed because of the exact same problems that ended up plaguing Rage's thread.

The main reason Rage's got locked was that people with misguided ideas of what was abusive and what wasn't were posting links to non-abusive reviews, which were then incorrectly flagged by other, equally misguided users (and people who were just flagging everything blindly). The result: The noobs got broken whistles, and the review mods often had to go into the thread and delete / belay the post linking to the review(s), thereby wasting their time.

This exact problem appears every time the method used by Rage's thread is tried. By posting links to reviews and telling people: "This is abusive, flag it.", there will be constant mistakes of that nature. This is where the point of this post comes in:

Instead of throwing a load of links here and telling everyone to flag the reviews they go to, another option is to tell people how to find said reviews on their own, without needing to be spoonfed by other people's links. So here you go: Everything I know about finding the damn things.

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First things first: What should you whistle?

This is something I'll not be giving specifics on, for the aforementioned reasons (and the fact that I'm not a mod, so you shouldn't be listening to specific rules advice from me anyway :P). However, if you want to play the whistle game, you need to learn to play it right, so here's a few useful links:

1. The review guidelines. Anything that's a direct violation of these will most likely be abusive, so it's a good idea to know them inside out before starting to look for abuse.
2. The review answers thread. It makes for a good read when trying to decide if something's abusive or just plain useless, and gives a lot of information about those areas of the review guidelines that are less well explained.
3. The new review answers thread. In addition to the same kind of advice the last one gives, this one is still unlocked, so if you have a question about something that hasn't been asked already, this is a good place to start (that is, if any review mods ever remember to check it!).
4. A reminder. While some of it is more a matter of opinion than anything else, it is still accurate with regards to what we do and don't know about the whistle system itself.
5. The abusive review game. It serves as a decent test of knowledge and understanding of the rules, as well as reinforcing everything linked to above it.

And remember: IF IN DOUBT, DON'T FLAG! Flagging stuff that could go either way with the review mods can cost you much more than you stand to gain by trying for a few extra whistle points in this manner.

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Done reading? OK, time to go find some abusive reviews! Listed below are all the places and tricks I like to go / use to find review abuse.

1. Turd of the week.
By far the easiest place to find abusive reviews is the TOTW (well, whenever it's not deleted at least). Just about every review guideline gets routinely broken here by butthurt idiots who think the review system is the same as YouTube's comment box. Lots of easy whistle points are left there every day, so be sure to check it regularly.

2. Front paged stuff.
The largest amount of web traffic goes through the front page, so naturally the most reviews get left for things on the front page. Ones to watch for are those submissions with 'adult' ratings or other questionable content, which often makes people use the review space for yelling at the author BECAUSE it's on the front page. Giving a flash a low score because of something the author has no control over is almost always abusive, and this makes odd frontpage choices a sensible thing to look into for abusive reviews.
However, it's not just the weird shit that gets review abuse, as the frontpage is also the most popular target for spammers and ad-bots, which will leave referral links and other blatantly abusive stuff in the review space. And let's not forget all the dumbass youtube commenters (who plainly haven't read the review guidelines) coming to the frontpage just to leave their crappy 2 cents on everything. All the random noobery on the front page alone can add up to a lot of abusive reviews a day.

3. The top 50 / weekly award winners.
As above, but often to a lesser extent. "This shouldn't be on the top 50 so here's a zero" is a common theme here, as well as all the usual review stupidity.

4. the 'Sort by score' button.
If you want to find abuse on a popular flash, but don't want to wade through hundreds of decent reviews just to find a few abusive 0-bombs, then this button is for you. Click on the text that says '567 reviews' (or however many reviews it has) to get to the review list for the flash. At the top there'll be a 'sort by date / rating' option. It's set to 'date' by default. By changing it to 'rating', and going to the last page of reviews, most of the hateful 0-bombing ones will have been distilled out of the rest of them, making it much easier to find them.
It might also be worth looking through the first few pages of the other end of the scale too, as some 10-reviews go too far when it comes to praising the flash (read: ascii art, text flooding etc.). It won't find all the abuse on a flash, but it makes a few dumb review types obvious at any rate.

5. Spam flashes.
Hoo boy, this one can get hilariously dumb. The abuse is so obvious I don't even need to go into why things from spam crews are worth looking at. Basically, anything with a Clock Crew, Lock Legion, Star Syndicate, or any of the countless other spam crew tags will get its fair share of shit, just for being made by a spam crew. Hell, some CC flashes are actually good, and people still tell the authors to go die in a fire for making it, just because they see spam as something to be destroyed at all costs.

6. New flash submissions.
The under judgement stuff can still be reviewed, even though said reviews can't be seen by anyone. Sometimes, people will use this fact to leave deliberately abusive stuff on flashes they think won't pass judgement (in which case, the review will be visible only in the obituaries, away from the reach of the whistle system). Sometimes these predictions go wrong, resulting in very obvious abuse being left on newly passed flashes. They get removed relatively quickly, but if you can catch them they make for free whistle points, so it's worth a look every now and then.

7. The Audio portal front page (especially the top 5).
Due to the lack of traffic, the audio portal gets very few reviews left in comparison with the flash portal. However, because of that same fact, the abusive reviews left there will stay there for much longer than your average abusive flash review. This is especially true for things that have gone off the front page, but the easiest place to find audio abuse is the top 5, where people often like to bitch about things being in the top 5, and giving them lousy scores because "this shit doesn't deserve it!".
Protip: the top 5 is selected by A-Bot, based on votes alone. If it gets in the top 5, then (by definition of what a vote signifies) it DOES deserve it!

8. 'Meme' flashes.
Lazers, Barrel rolls, desserts of questionable veracity; you name it, if it's in a flash people will be tempted to spew whatever meme the flash is about. A good example of this is the Lazer collab series: the number of ascii art shoops I've flagged in the review lists for them is just moronic. Same goes for any other flash that either started or is centered around a meme.
(This includes flashes that start NG related memes and activities, like the infamous 'B').

9. People's review lists.
If you see a blatantly abusive review, check the rest of the user's review list by clicking on the link in the review (to go to his userpage), and then scrolling down to the 'flash reviews' or 'audio reviews' links at the bottom. A really bad review is practically proof of not knowing the review guidelines, and if they leave one abusive review (be it through ignorance or malice), chances are there'll be more where it came from.
However, if you find a link spammer with more than a handful of spam reviews, it's best to notify a review mod instead of flagging them all, as review mods have said that they don't always give out points for every single review left by spambots and whistled, and can just destroy the whole list. Ergo, you'd be wasting your time if you flagged them all. Small lists of spam is usually OK (since they can be cleaned up with the normal tools), but it's still worth contacting a mod over it (after flagging them all first :P).

10. The obituaries.
Weird, no? The last place you'd expect to find abusive reviews is somewhere where you can't actually flag anything. However, applying no.9 to the obituaries can turn up some surprising stuff in people's review lists. It doesn't matter if the flash was deleted or not, the review was still written, and if it shows a complete lack of knowledge of the review rules, then the same thing usually applies here too.
This doesn't have as high a success rate as looking in the lists of reviewers of recent (non-deleted) flash, since abusive reviews aren't cleaned completely from the system on deletion, and will re-appear in the obituaries if the flash gets deleted, meaning the review abuse you would've found by looking in the existing flash reviews may have been removed already by the time you find it in the obituaries (more so than when you use new flashes as start points to look for abusive review lists).

And if all else fails:

11. Google advanced.
Why bother searching yourself when you can get the world's most powerful search engine to do the work for you?
Well, a couple of good reasons actually. The first is that it's way more fiddly to set up and use, and also that it can bring back abusive reviews from ages ago (like, pre-2003 when there weren't any review guidelines at all). However, when used properly (and when it works) it can make finding abusive reviews very, very easy.
Firstly, go to the Google advanced search option, and enter any of the following in the "Search within a site or domain" box at the bottom:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/revie ws (for flash reviews).
or
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/review s (for audio reviews).
or
http://www.newgrounds.com/art/reviews (for art reviews).

Then, enter whatever keywords you can think of in either of the two top boxes. 'fuck you', 'stolen', 'php?act=idx' (<= it's a common part of several popular spam links) 'blam this', 'front page', or anything else you can think of to use as keywords when looking for questionable reviews. If there are any reviews containing the keywords you enter, Google will find them. However, it can't tell the difference between a review and the authors response to a review (and sometimes it can bring back results of already deleted reviews for some reason). It takes practice, and patience, but there's no hiding from Google. If it's been left, regardless of where or when, Google can find it, making it a powerful tool when looking for them.

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That's all, folks!

Although, by no means is this a definitive list. I'm sure there are loads of other tips and tricks at everyone's disposal that I don't know about. If you want to share any tips you have, or want to add anything to what's been written here, please do. The more collective advice that gets posted here, the better.

NOTE: I will let people post links to flashes that get more than their fair share of review abuse, provided the following is heeded in their comments:

- It isn't the TOTW, on the front page, or somewhere else already covered in this newspost. That's just pointless given the context of all this.
- No links to reviews / descriptions of which reviews should be flagged / anything that points out exact reviews. That's what killed Rage's thread, and I'm not letting comments with any of that same spoonfeeding mentality through.
- It actually does attract a lot of genuine abuse. Only if you're absolutely sure what you're seeing in the review list is against the rules (i.e. you've read the review guidelines and the linked threads, and have seen a review mod say that what you're reading shouldn't be in the review space), should you be posting it here.

And above all else, have fun laughing at all the hopeless, moronic, and downright bizarre things people like to write in that review box. Enjoy!

Updated: 09/13/09 10:16 PM 29 comments | Log in to comment! | Share this!

This is something I had going on in a BBS thread, and decided to move to my userpage so I could edit and change it without needlessly bumping the thread with posts containing an ever-lengthening list of all the users that were mods at one point or another, for the various areas of the site. Listed are their current names, any old names they used to have (where a known name change has occurred, it'll be added to the list as '[old name] - see [new name]') and what part of the site they were moderating.

This list is always under construction, so it will change whenever new information needs to be added (i.e. more mods get de-modded, or more old ones get remembered).

Okay, here we go:

ADT - Review
Alastor - BBS
Antiganondworf - Review
AntiTanner - BBS
B0UNC3 - Audio
BadBit - Audio
Bendo - Icon
bigbadron - BBS, Review
BlackMarketKraig - BBS (got remodded)
BobbyJenkins - BBS
BRS - BBS
Canas - BBS, Review (got remodded for Review)
CaptainBob - BBS, Audio, Icon
Captain-Jack - BBS
cHunter - Icon
DanMalo - BBS, Audio
DanPaladin - BBS
DarkArchon - BBS
Davidzx - BBS, Review, Audio, Icon (+Art?) (as a joke, for 4 minutes)
Denvish - BBS, Audio, Icon
DirtySyko - BBS
Dobio - BBS, Audio (got remodded for BBS)
DodgerOfZion - Audio
DrLavaGoddess - BBS
Dry-Ice - BBS
Egoraptor - Art
Enoll - BBS
Evark - BBS, Review (got remodded)
EveningShift - BBS
FDA - BBS
FIGMENTUM - BBS, Review
Freakapotimus - BBS
FUNKbrs - BBS
gfoxcook - BBS
Gooch - BBS, Audio
HAQnSPITT - BBS
HuIk - BBS
Inuyasha - Review
JadeTheAssassin - BBS, Art
jercurpac - BBS
jmtb02 - BBS
jonthomson - BBS
JoS - BBS (got remodded)
KaynSlamdyke - BBS
Karco - Audio
Kartoffels - see Zendra
keldor3353 - BBS (one day only)
Kisuke - see Inuyasha
life - BBS (for 20 minutes)
Luis - BBS (got remodded)
macdeth - Review
MaestroRage - Audio
Maus - BBS, Review, Audio
mightypotato - BBS
Nephthys - see Captain-Jack
Newgrundling - BBS
olskoo - BBS
Ozcar - BBS
Osamarama - see Sanjay
ParagonX9 - Audio
Proteas - BBS
Rabid-Echidna - BBS
Ramagi - BBS, Review, Icon
RedCircle - BBS
RedDakota - BBS (was Wade's alt)
ReNaeNae - BBS, Art (got remodded)
Revenant - Audio
Recoil - Audio
Remisser - Audio
Rig - BBS, Audio (got remodded)
Rucklo - BBS, Audio (got remodded)
Sanjay - BBS, Review (original account deleted; current "Sanjay" account was made to stop people abusing the name)
Sarai - BBS
Saturday - BBS
ShitonaStick - BBS
Shrapnel - BBS
Slightly-Crazy-Dude - BBS
Snayk - BBS
Spy - see Antiganondworf
StarCleaver - BBS
StealthSteve - see SteveGuzzi
StephanosGnomon - see SteveGuzzi
SteveGuzzi - BBS
Stormwarden - BBS, Review
Sorohanro - Audio
TannerCenterwall - see AntiTanner
TBF - BBS, Audio
TedEaston - BBS
Terminator - BBS
TheShrike - BBS (got remodded)
Transformer - BBS (was another mod's alt)
Tremour - BBS
Uberbarista - BBS, Review, Audio, Icon
Undercover - see Terminator
VeryProudOfYa - BBS
WritersBlock - Audio
wtf-kurdt - Review
Zendra - BBS, Review (got remodded)

And there you have it.
There are a few gaps in places (namely the fact that no-one remembers icon and audio mods very well), but it'll hopefully get better with time and people coming forward with new stuff (if I PM them for it). If anyone knows of people that have been missed off, let me know and (once confirmed) I'll add them to the list as well.

Updated: 01/02/10 10:10 AM 14 comments | Log in to comment! | Share this!

This is just a list I decided to make for.... well, myself really. It's a load of stuff explaining things about BBS rules, flash submission rules, and anything else I could do with remembering in the future (as well as random funny shit I see when i'm trawling through the old posts). I'll be updating this if and when I find more crap to put in it:

Useful things:
The NG official topics list (Some threads are outdated, and no longer relevant, but it's mostly still good.)
A collection of in-house rule threads.
What you shouldn't do on the BBS.
More in-depth explanations of some BBS rules.
How to bump old topics without getting banned for it.
What counts as backseat modding.
What is, and isn't, considered 'spam'.
Why you should read the WHOLE thread before posting. (Several people got banned in this example.)
Why you should vote fairly on under judgement flashes.
How not to fuck up your whistle.
More stuff about review flagging.
How to write decent reviews (and ask 'why' if one was deleted)
Yes, there ARE rules for your blog posts.
How the Politics forum works.
Can't find a thread you're after? Give this a try.
Failing the above, try this instead.
Everything an audio artist needs to know: Short version.
Everything an audio artist needs to know: Long version.
The art portal help section.
Why you should ignore it when someone insults you.
What to do if you're sick of a flash submission. (Note: YOUR OWN flash submission!)
Got a bone to pick? Do it here.
Wanna contribute to NG? Watch this.
Find something stolen? PM Wade.

Funny shit:
The greatest collection of awesomeness. Ever.
A big pile of funny lock messages.
Being daft with BBS screenshots.
A very funny photoshop picture. (Poozy doesn't agree, but meh.)
Asking to be a mod is not smart. At all.
Error message generator + Newgrounds = Stupidity.
The dickneck awakens. (Turned out to be a troll, but who cares?)
Yes, you really are this predictable.
Got a funny video? Post it here.
Chat-room nonsense.
The funniest picture thread ever.
Ban sammiches! :D
Jonas = owned.
Feed your inner pirate.
MOD FIGHT!!!
Mod fight round 2: Simpsons style!
Epic Photoshop fail.
The most pathetic thing I've ever read.
Fuck you, Rig.
Mod derailings are fun!
How dumb do you have to be to post this?
A crap thread, made epic.
Who said nerds can't have a good laugh?
Everyone was a noob once.
The best flash ever.
Banned!
Um... re-railed?
Oh, the irony....
Derailed!
Do I win?

Also, the dumbest idea for a thread i've seen so far is this. That link will change if and when I find anything stupider.

I know there's more out there, I just haven't found them yet. Anyone know of more things I should add to this?

Updated: 12/19/09 3:13 PM 12 comments | Log in to comment! | Share this!

1. Shit Happens
2. You're all gonna die
3. There's always one
4. It's not that simple
5. Rules were made to be broken

2 comments | Log in to comment! | Share this!