Board Thread:Chat Discussion/@comment-5590118-20141110075448

In light of the recent fallout between a certain admin and I there are some things I want to address.

First of all I would like to inform you all that our chat is publicly logged. This means that anything you say on chat (while the bot is here) is recorded and is publicly accessible. You may find past logs here. These logs are indexed by Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Google, Yahoo, Bing)

The second thing I would like to address is some of the things Quality Control also does (in case you were not already aware) are as follows. QC is a bot that has many different purposes (none of them are malicious although it's operation has not been transparent) it's main job is to log chats and find/tag spam on wikis (Community Central at the moment). These two may seem very different but in QC's operation the two tie together.

Over the past several months QC has been used to detect and flag spam blogs on Community Central using algorithms that take massive sets and months of fine tuning. Recently I have started a new project which aims to make this process a little easier. In order to test these things (fine tune them as well) I have been using the chat logs and a few criteria in order to try and create software that can draw conclusions about data given to it much faster. A few of the criteria are a users Age, Gender, Sexual Orientation (this in practice doesn't work), and a users country of origin. Keep in mind that it is not sitting there hacking into emails and social media to get this information but rather it is just looking at things you have said in the last hour or so of chat (it examines the logs after they have been posted. QC does NOT work in real time). Now I know that this makes a few users uncomfortable and I am willing to hear those concerns and work to fix them so that everyone can be happy. This means that I can alter the software to exclude any or all of the fields above in favor of new fields that users can agree on and feel comfortable about.

If any of the fields are changed you can rest assured that the data QC currently stores in it's brain (a MySQL database) will be disposed of immediately. Alternatively users can also request to opt-out of being used to train and fine tune QC's software if they so choose.

In the future I plan to run QC in a much more transparent way so that every user is aware of what it does and can feel comfortable being around it.

The last thing I would like to address is what I am doing with the data currently collected. At the moment I am not doing anything with it nor do I plan to. QC only collects information in order to help it make assumptions about other users. In the future this software will be modified to collect information on know spam blog makers and the blogs themselves in order to help fight off vandals/spammers. After the bot is fine tuned and ready to test on blogs all of the data it currently holds about users will be dumped and it will cease to collect it from chat.

If there are any other questions, concerns, or suggestions please leave them below so that they can be discussed. 