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Comment by cauenapier | Hacker News Reader

I'm the site author and creator of TownSquare. The only moment it got a bit abused it was during the first HN spike. But before and after that, everything was friendly.

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Love this idea and your creation of it. Unfortunately do think the parent's concerns are valid - at this moment on your site at least one person has set their name to something offensive so it shows up perpetually (under the street light). Anonymity+connectivity persists in bringing out the worst of our impulses, I guess...

Do you think names are really necessary? Or could they take some other form than text, perhaps unicode chars chosen from a selection of abstract shapes? The wonderful https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ comes to mind.

teranoptia looks cool as hell, thanks for sharing!

I think there might be some merit to a basic filter, perhaps some sort of timeout for obvious slurs. I see a few right now.

This is already sort of implemented. But moderation is a very very difficult problem to be solved and there are different philosophies for it...

How about these? - rate limit overall messages, maybe even percentage wise: if some ip sent more than 70% of all messages in the last minute, mute it. - let other users mark/report spam and if three others agree something is spam, block all slightly similar messages for 24 hours? - forbid sending the exact same message more than N times per M seconds. - rate limit color change and jump much more.

Yeah, some of those are good ideas. I'll implement them. Thanks for the contribution! (Instead of just say it won't work, heheheh)

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