The Notification Situation

Part of the alleged fun of Datalounge are the notifications you receive when you get a WW or, sometimes, a Mention. This is a feature that really only works if you're a paid member.

This guide will also talk about how to navigate replies, or R-numbers as they're sometimes called.

Notifications

Notifications show up in the Notification tab, which is the green bell icon located at the very top right of the website. If you receive a WW/like or someone mentions you, there will be a little gray number next to the green bell indicating a notification. If you are not a paid member, all you will see is "You need a subscription to access this feature click here to subscribe." (Typos are theirs, not mine.) If you are paid, you'll see something like this:

You can click on those notifications individually, and they will take you to the reply that was liked.

Notifications show you not only likes, but sometimes Mentions. The Mentions feature is glitchy and it doesn't always work, and the number of WWs you get on a post almost never jibes with the number shown in your Notifications tab. 

Mentions in the Notifications tab are meant to tell you when someone replied to you with an R# reply. (To see more about how R#s work, scroll down to the R# section.) The Mentions feature stopped working in about 2022, possibly because of that one specific troll who would do nothing but post R#s in his replies, basically spamming users with notifications.

Sometimes you will get a notification telling you who specifically replied to you or upvoted your post, i.e. the "redname" of the user who responded to you or clicked WW, but that feature seems to have been mostly disabled, so it's rare to get that. I still do, sometimes, but only with one specific "rednamed" user, and I suspect that's just a glitch.

Keep in mind that you will not be notified when you receive an FF. You may not even know you've gotten any until you get so many you get a timeout. If this has happened to you, see my previous post on how to get out of a timeout.

You also will not be notified if you get ignored by another user.

R#s

There is no real term for R#s, which are also called R-numbers, or R-replies, or sometimes just Replies, depending on who you talk to. It just means a specific reply as designated by its number in the thread.

In the course of a thread, if you want to refer to a specific reply, you can type R followed by the number of their reply, and the system will automatically create a little pop-up if you tap on or hover over the R#.

For example, the person below typed in "R4" to refer to reply #4 in the thread, and the system automatically turned the "R4" green and put it in brackets. On a PC, when I hover over the R4, I see R4's post. On a phone, you can just tap on the R4 to see R4's post. This allows us to see replies without scrolling all the way up.

If you want to do this yourself in a thread, you would just type R4 (or whatever number of reply you were referencing) in your post. You don't need to type brackets or dashes or anything, just R and the number of the reply you want to reference, without spaces. For example, R7 in the photo above would have typed this:

R4 nailed it.

...to get the reply as shown.

In the example above, the author of R4 will get a notification saying "Someone mentioned you at R7 in 'Tasteful friends...'" but only f they're a paid member.

Again, this is a feature that's mostly useful to paid members, and it's also glitchy, meaning you won't get all your notifications sometimes, and at other times, you'll get extra notifications for a single WW or mention.

Our Buttons, Ourselves: WWs, FFs, and Ignores

Much of this guide will be basic information that most Datalounge users already know, though I do go into some detail about the automoderation system, based on my personal experience. Remember, I am not affiliated with Datalounge or Mediapolis and I have no real knowledge of the board's operations or moderation. I can only talk about what I have observed through use of the website. 

Datalounge currently utilizes a sort of automated self-moderation system which is, the best anyone can tell, only partially operational at this point. It appears that some of the moderation is now manually done by a human, and not all of the original features of the automod system still work they way they did when it was introduced in 2016.

The point of this system is to allow users to basically do their own moderation; however, as already mentioned in my previous post, the system is very easy to manipulate, so all that it really achieved is that trolls and bad-faith users with a bunch of accounts/sockpuppets have made themselves the defacto moderators. 

That said, the lynchpins of this self-moderation system are the WW and FF buttons and, to a lesser extent, the Ignore button. The Datalounge FAQ -- yes, there is a FAQ, and you should read it -- states that "Users with negative reputation (lots of flames and freaks and ignores on their posts) may be restricted from posting, modding and voting in polls." This means any account that receives a lot of FFs and Ignores can potentially have their posting ability taken away via timeouts, lengthy bans, or enjoy the full redtag permaban experience.

THE BASICS OF BUTTONS

The buttons are light blue and orange and located underneath the post or reply in question, on the bottom right side. If you're in light mode, you'll see them here, like so:

If you're in dark mode, you have to click the green box-and-arrow doodad on the bottom right to see those buttons:

WW is in a light blue circle with a "WW" inside. Clicking it is basically an upvote, indicating you thought the post was funny or you approved of the sentiment. There is no limit to the number of WWs you can give out. Each post and reply will show how many WW votes it's received by the little green number on top of the blue WW button. 

FF is in orange with a "FF" inside. Clicking it means you're flagging a post for being a problem. Ostensibly, you're supposed to use this for particularly bad troll posts only, per the FAQ. You don't want to use this as a general downvote, because you are limited to how many FFs you can give out per day. Currently, you can only use FF three times in a 24-hour period before it's disabled. When it's disabled, the button will be grayed out on every post and reply on the board, and you can't click it. If your own posts or replies receive enough FFs, you will get your reply grayed out, get a timeout, or even get banned.

Currently, if you click either the WW or the FF button, both buttons should go gray. That's to indicate that you've already essentially "cast your vote" on that post or reply, and you can't do it again. However, the buttons don't always stay gray, and I go into that in more detail below.

Ignore is the little dude in orange with a "No" slash through him. You click on that when you want to put a person on ignore and not see their posts anymore. If you click on it on a thread, the thread will be ignored, but this feature is not really working at this time. Sometimes a thread will be ignored if you click the button, but the majority of the time, it won't.

That's the short answer, now here's the long one: 

WW: When you receive a WW, you should get a notification in the upper right corner near the green bell icon. Similarly, when you WW someone, they will get a notification. If you're not a paid member then all you will see is a little gray number near the green bell icon, so you won't know what specifically got the WW vote. If you are a paid member, you'll be able to see what was given a WW, and sometimes even who gave it. (See more about Notifications here.) 

Once you WW something, both the WW and FF buttons are supposed to go gray. This means you can't correct yourself if you've accidentally hit WW when you meant FF, or vice versa. However, there is a glitch that means that sometimes the WW does not stay grayed out after you've clicked it, which allows you to WW something multiple times. Trolls are notorious for doing this with their own replies, which is why you'll sometimes see a particularly shitty post or reply with a large number of WWs.

WW stands for "Wit & Wisdom." Many years ago, Datalounge had a sidebar feature called "Datalounge Wit & Wisdom" where posts or replies that got a lot of upvotes were featured. 

Many years ago, trolls discovered that the automated moderation system was easy to manipulate, and they used it to get any post they wanted into the Wit & Wisdom sidebar column. After more and more people caught on, the sidebar was removed. It briefly returned on the front page as "Datalounge Zeitgeist" in about 2016, but the trolls immediately manipulated that as well, and the stand-alone Wit & Wisdom feature was removed and has never returned.

Instead of a sidebar that highlights witty or wise posts, the WW button was changed to show how many WWs a reply or post has received, plus you also get a notification, though as I mentioned earlier, it's really only useful if you're a paid member. (See my Notifications post if you want to know more.)

FF: You are limited to giving 3 FFs per 24-hour period, which is one reason why trolls have sockpuppets, so they can give more than 3 FFs and get people timed out or banned. When you click FF, both the WW and FF buttons should gray out, as mentioned above. However, sometimes they don't. That said, you are still only given 3 FFs per 24-hour period, so if the FF button you just clicked doesn't gray out, and you click it again, that will count as the 2nd of your 3 total FFs allotted per day.

The 3 FFs are not really per day, they are per 24-hour period. For example:

8:00 a.m. Wednesday: You FF the guy who permanently tattooed a little Hitler moustache on himself.

9:00 a.m. Wednesday: You FF the guy who claimed all potatoes are sentient beings.

7:59 a.m. Thursday: You FF the guy who posts a picture of Spongebob getting pounded by a Sasquatch.

At that point you will lose the ability to FF at all for 24 hours; the FFs won't come back for you until 8:00 a.m. on Friday. The system correctly reads 8:00 a.m. Wednesday to 7:59 a.m. Thursday as 23 hours and 59 minutes, meaning you've used 3 FFs in a 24-hour period. 

However, that means you don't really get 3 FFs per day. If you use all 3 of your FFs on Monday, you get none on Tuesday because you have to wait 24 hours, then you can FF 3 times on Wednesday, but not at all on Thursday, then 3 on Friday. That means you were only able to give out FFs on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, i.e. just 9 FFs in a five-day period. Datalounge makes it sound like you get 15 in a 5-day period, but you don't.

This is the exact kind of thing that makes Datalounge confusing, and while no one who works at Datalounge would ever admit it, it's my personal opinion that they do this on purpose. 

Ignore: When you click the Ignore button on a reply, everything written by that user in any thread on Datalounge will disappear for you. (This is key to the use of what is colloquially known as "ignore-dar," which I'll go into later. It's complicated. Everything on Datalounge is complicated.)

You are currently limited to 255 users in your ignored list. You can access the list by clicking "Ignored" in green in the black bar at the top of the page. If you try to ignore someone and it doesn't stick, check your ignored list and make sure you have not maxed out. If you have, you'll have to remove some entries in the ignored list.

If someone ignores you, you won't know it. You get no notification if someone has ignored you.

You can also click ignore on a thread, but that doesn't seem to work anymore, and hasn't for a long time. You may be able to ignore a thread for a little while, but it will un-ignore itself eventually.

Manipulations Galore:

To WW a reply (including your own) multiple times, you click WW, then go out to another thread or the main page, wait a few seconds, then go back into the thread with the reply in question. You'll see right away if the WW has been grayed out. If not, just WW yourself again, then lather, rinse, repeat until you've given yourself the number of WWs you want.

Note that if you give yourself an obnoxious amount of WWs, you'll look like a troll. When you see someone post something stupid like, "You're a big poopyhead who smells like poop" and gets 57 WWs for it, you'll know trolling is afoot.

Above is an example of a manipulated post. A troll has, as of this writing, given themselves 664 WWs. Their replies in the thread have also been given hundreds of WWs. The link to the thread is here, and there's no indication anyone has bothered to moderate the board for a few days, so it's likely the thread will stay up. If it does not, then here is the archived version.

Trolls WW themselves to try to prevent being FFed into a timeout. The good news is that any FFs they get after their flood of WWs still count, and the previous WWs don't outweigh that.

This means that if some troll post has 57 WWs, but then gets about 6 FFs after those WWs, they'll still get a time out. They have to get more WWs after the 6 FFs to counteract it.

This goes for you, too, if you're a troll: Have you been WWing yourself a million times to prevent a timeout? You're wasting your time. Someone can come along 6 hours later and FF you several times and you're gonna get a timeout anyway, you big dummy.

Note that Datalounge users probably won't want to waste any FFs on old posts. Look at the date! If it's more than 12 hours old, you probably don't want to even bother. The automod system apparently keeps track of when something was posted, and if you FF it "too late" then the system doesn't care. 

Also note that sometimes trolls will give someone else an obnoxious amount of WWs to falsely make them look like trolls. They will almost always announce this, however, so if you see a banal post like "Cinnamon Pop-Tarts are good" get 150 WWs, and someone else in the thread is hollering, "The Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Troll is WWing themselves constantly! Everyone FF the Cinnamon Pop-Tarts Troll!" you should probably assume fuckery is afoot.

This has been an obnoxiously long post, mostly because the voting system on Datalounge is obnoxious. The more I write about how DL works, the more I realize that it's barely working at all.

Timeouts and the Art of Combatting Them

There have been complaints lately of Datalounge users getting undeserved timeouts, short bans of a few hours or up to one day. Datalounge partially uses an automated moderation system that relies on the WW, FF, and Ignore buttons to work. As the Datalounge FAQ says, users with a lot of FFs and Ignores on their posts may be banned from posting on DL for some time. 

That means the FFs and Ignores users give each other allows users to essentially moderate the board. Unfortunately, bad actors can manipulate this moderation system, and you can get a timeout or a ban for no good reason. This has been a problem with Datalounge for many years.

I figured it was a good time to offer a little primer on what timeouts are and how to get rid of one, should you become one of the troll's targets. 

Please note that if you were given a ban or a timeout from a moderator, this tutorial will probably not work for you. This is entirely about dealing with a ban that you received because someone gamed the system to silence you out of spite.

This is a long post and it's meant to be educational, rather than just instructional, but if you don't care about the why and just want to know how to start posting again, scroll down to HOW TO UNDO A TIMEOUT and enjoy. 

Datalounge is theoretically "self moderating;" that is, there is an automatic moderation system in place that was installed in about 2016, when the current website layout was launched. Over the years, bits and pieces of this automatic moderation system have been disabled, changed, or broken. You'll never know which it is, because Mediapolis, owners of Datalounge, have a firm rule about not informing users of anything. 

This automod system is almost entirely useless to normal people, but is a positive boon for trolls. It's easily manipulated, and anyone who has gone to the trouble of creating alternate and/or sockpuppet accounts can put you in timeout, ban you for a few days, or delete your replies. It appears they can even get you banned and redtagged, if the actual human moderator isn't paying enough attention. 

The timeouts, temporary bans, and disappearing replies are all automated, apparently. That means if someone uses their extra accounts to FF you enough times, you will get timed out. (It also happens if you piss off enough regular people and genuinely get a lot of FFs, but that appears to almost never happen.) 

Users/sockpuppets can also give you enough FFs that your individual reply will become grayed out, and eventually just disappear completely off the board. I don't know the exact numbers for these things, but my experience is that receiving 5 FFs on one reply gets you timed out, 6 or more gets your reply grayed out. No idea how many it takes to get your reply deleted. Once grayed out or deleted, no amount of WWs seems to change it back to normal.

Just as a side note, if you get enough FFs to get a full ban instead of just a timeout, you could end up redtagged and permanently banned. A "redtag" is the term used for a troll who has had all of their posts grayed out, with a notation at the bottom that reads something like this: [ troll 6000 ]

It appears that a human moderator is behind giving out redtags, but humans are not infallible, and they sometimes don't realize that a user was FFed by a troll with sockpuppets and did not really earn a ban. 

It's also unknown whether FFs can get a whole thread deleted. It appears that a few FFs will cause it to essentially disappear because it will stop being bumped to the top of the list when it gets a new reply, and the OP will get grayed out. Actual thread deletion seems to be under the purview of the human moderator. Still, enough FFs and your thread will basically disappear into oblivion. 

The upshot of all this is that the trolls are the ones moderating Datalounge. That means it's up to us to undo the damage the trolls are doing. No one at Mediapolis is going to do it; they've made it clear that they don't care, and if past comments from the moderator account are any indication, it's possible that they don't even know how to fix the problem. 

HOW TO UNDO A TIMEOUT: 

The only way to combat a troll FFing you and giving you a timeout is to give yourself WWs. 

There are two tricks to know about this: one, your WWs have to be on relatively recent replies, and two, only WWs received after the timeout count toward ending your timeout. If you got 50 WWs on a reply but then later received 6 FFs, you'll still get a timeout. You have to give yourself new WWs to counteract that. 

Give yourself a bunch of WWs on replies -- any reply will do, it doesn't have to be on the reply that someone FFed -- and give the system about 15 minutes to catch up, and you should be able to reply again. Yes, WWing yourself will work. 

That's the short answer, and now here's the long one: 

How do you know if you got a timeout? If you try to reply to a thread and you get the dreaded pop-up: Oops, Could Not Save Post, try going to another thread first. Scroll to the bottom. If you see the light blue bar at the bottom of the screen telling you you don't have permission to post at this time, check to see if Prime Time is on -- a bright blue bar will tell you at the top of the home page. 

If Prime Time is not on or if you're a paid user, the next thing you should do is check your Account settings. To do this, click on "Account" in the upper right corner. If the system has logged you out (which it does every 2 weeks or so, give or take) you could be getting a false "do not have permission to post." If you go out to Account and see that you're not logged in, log in again and test your ability to post replies. That may fix your problem. 

If none of that works, you've gotten a timeout. You'll probably already know that it happened, because you were in a fight with a troll and things got a little heated. Your reply may also get grayed out, which is another tell-tale sign. 

At this point, start WWing your own replies. It doesn't matter which replies, just WW them yourself. If you have sockpuppets of your own, log in and WW some more. 

Helpful tip: Don't WW yourself a bunch on just one reply, because that's going to make you look like a troll. WW yourself on recent, random replies, and try to be chill about it. Your goal is to not let the trolls know what you're up to. 

I should probably mention here that it's almost certain that the Datalounge moderator will know what you're up to. You're probably not going to fool anyone who actually works for the company. This is about undoing what trolls have done, it's not about getting away with being a troll. If you've said something terrifically awful and deserve the FFs you've received, be an adult and take your lumps.

Once you've given yourself several new WWs, close your Datalounge tab and reopen it and see if you can post. I don't know how many WWs counteract a timeout, but I've had it work with as few as 12 WWs. If other people are WWing you because you were being particularly smart or funny, those WWs will also count, of course. 

You'll have to wait a bit for the system to catch up, and maybe close your whole browser and open it back up again, but this should work. 

I know some will be saying that posting this info is also telling the trolls how DL works, but here's the deal: they already know how to do this. The problem is that regular DL users often don't and therefore are at the mercy of the trolls. It's time we changed all that.

(A previous version of this post was posted on r/Datalounge on 21 Feb 2023)