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+2 votes
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As it is, the badge encourages many cachers to post long irrelevant parts to their logs, for instance excerpts from Wikipedia articles or just ASCII art. This makes reading logs a worse experience than the alternative where cachers just write extremely short logs, as the information conveied stays the same, while being a lot more tedious to read through.

Could be badge not be designed to filter out repeated parts in logs, or at the very least to exclude ASCII art?
in Feature requests by Max 1996 (140 points)
The badge has some basic filtering. I don't know the exact rules for the filtering but for example putting "Lorem Ipsum" in a log will make that whole log count as zero words.

I think an issue with extending the filtering would be that it's easy to turn this in to a full time job. Making something "impossible to cheat at" usually just make people better cheaters and then you have to make it "impossible" again and so on. You can't really have a full on "plagiarism checker" for just one badge, it doesn't make sense to spend that level of time and resources on it IMO.

Removing the badge seems like the easy solution, but that would also mean many people will lose a point for their belt so that might not be appreciated by everybody.
Yes, but honestly the point number changing would be a really minor inconvenience that most people likely wont notice anyway. Meanwhile the excessive spam in the logs actually makes the experience worse for everyone. I was trying to be constructive and give ideas for alternative solutions, ultimately if these are too difficult then the badge should be removed.
I feel like the logs should be a place where everyone shares their experiences with a cache, sure some people will just spam TFTC or an emoji, but that is better than having to scroll past 200 lines of random symbols.
An other issue is that not everybody uses Project-GC as their main source of statistics. Removing the badge might get rid of some of the bad logs, but if people are using GSAK then they might have motivation to keep going with the copypasting since they will keep the badge even if it's removed from Project-GC.
That does not seem like a good reason for not doing it. Even if it halves the problem, that's worth it. Besides, I believe the fast majority of the community, at least as I observe it in germany, does use Project GC over GSAK.
I wasn't saying that was a reason to not do it, I'm just saying it might not be the "ultimate fix" that some people believe it to be. :)
That's a valid point, put I am pretty sure removing the bad incentive will definitely reduce the amount happening. Remember that it is also down to people seeing other people doing it, and deciding it's ok because of that. One person stopping has a ripple effect causing other people to stop doing it as well.

2 Answers

+2 votes
First: I totally get your point, I am also bugged by the obvious spam.

But here is the but: We have already reduced the misuse by capping it at 100 words and not allowing loops. Plus, Pleu already mentioned the GSAK users (German cachers are still a big user of GSAK), which would continue doing spammy logs.

One big problem is that most of these people only realize about the badge after having found hundreds iif not thousands of logs. And to balance their very short log word count, they usually massively enlarge their logs after that. There would be an elegant way to increase the number, though: Editing old logs (at least on caches still active), the word count will go up. But of course that takes way more effort than simply maxing future logs. ;)

An extensive "spam filter" takes just too much work to set up and maintain. One option (instead of removing the badge altogether) would be further decreasing the requirement. On the other hand: if it is too simple, we could get rid of it.

PS: I admit that I also kind of "bloat" my logs a bit with some kind of "cache status report" and a short quote, but at least I write interesting info into the "status report" (like: condition of cache or log sheet, trackables, etc.)
by clappy (16.3k points)
+1 vote
Seconded, the badge just encourages posting walls of useless text in logs. I would be for removing it entirely.
by Jendrej_ (220 points)
Please no, i reached the diamond batch without writing spam logs
You can brag about it in your bio or something :) The average length stat would stay too
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