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We don't allow any HTML tags in video descriptions (we pass them through a simple tag stripping filter). But we do automatically add anchor tags to urls for mo

We don't allow any HTML tags in video descriptions (we pass them through a simple tag stripping filter). But we do automatically add anchor tags to urls for most videos (just not new user's videos). I agree that it's a bit of a UI issue, but communicating to a new nonpaying user that their text-only urls will one-day turn into clickable urls is particularly simple. Looking at the public videos, and reading the article, I think an automatic system detected a new user both adding urls to two separate videos, and the same user modifying those links slightly. That's sufficiently unusual behaviour that it met some threshold for an automated account ban.

ineedasername 7y ago
Okay, I'm not saying it's completely awful to try to detect bad behavior in this way, but you keep offering up explanations for why it happened when the real issue here is the lack of transparency into a rule that can get you banned, when it should be trivial to instead offer users useful feedback. As the author said, this behavior has a chilling effect, or at least an extremely frustrating one. The issue isn't "why the user's actions resulted in a ban", it's the fact that the entire situation should have been avoidable.
- drivebycomment 7y ago
  They can't share the detailed rules since that will give abusers more information to take advantage of. You assume everyone is a legitimate user, but non trivial fraction of online accounts are for abuse. Since the perfect precision on abuse detection is impossible and insufficient abuse detection often means a death for the service (spam, legal, PR), this is impossible to avoid. The only question is the rate of false positive flagging. Given that this is purely anecdotal, it doesn't give me any way to assess whether Vimeo's false positive is egregiously bad or not.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    I don't see how an error message stating, "html markup is not allowed in your post" will in anyway facilitate more abuse than banning when the abusive bad actors will simply take the ban as a signal of the same, create another account, and then avoid the activity. There's a balance to be struck between usability and abuse prevention, and currently Vimeo has got it wrong.

ineedasername 7y ago

Okay, I'm not saying it's completely awful to try to detect bad behavior in this way, but you keep offering up explanations for why it happened when the real issue here is the lack of transparency into a rule that can get you banned, when it should be trivial to instead offer users useful feedback. As the author said, this behavior has a chilling effect, or at least an extremely frustrating one. The issue isn't "why the user's actions resulted in a ban", it's the fact that the entire situation should have been avoidable.

drivebycomment 7y ago
They can't share the detailed rules since that will give abusers more information to take advantage of. You assume everyone is a legitimate user, but non trivial fraction of online accounts are for abuse. Since the perfect precision on abuse detection is impossible and insufficient abuse detection often means a death for the service (spam, legal, PR), this is impossible to avoid. The only question is the rate of false positive flagging. Given that this is purely anecdotal, it doesn't give me any way to assess whether Vimeo's false positive is egregiously bad or not.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  I don't see how an error message stating, "html markup is not allowed in your post" will in anyway facilitate more abuse than banning when the abusive bad actors will simply take the ban as a signal of the same, create another account, and then avoid the activity. There's a balance to be struck between usability and abuse prevention, and currently Vimeo has got it wrong.