User blog comment:Speccyemerald/How excatly do the mods and rollbacks know that is a trollpasta and what isn't? Why have the rules on pastas been tightened?/@comment-24101790-20151128180121

We generally look at the overall quality of a story. If it's abysmal ("One dae i saw a gost cuvered in blud."), we look at the story to see if the author is playing it up for effect (and/or inserting comedic elements into it) or if they just happen to be a seven year old who joined the wiki and their errors are unintentional. Either way, the story gets deleted and the user is either given a three day ban for writing a troll pasta/spam page or they are given a low quality warning which states that if they post another story of that low quality (all/nothing capitalized, zero punctuation, all one big paragraph, etc.) they will be given a ban ranging from 1-3 days. In the end, there really isn't much difference between a troll pasta and extremely low quality story.

As for quality standards, they have tightened up in the past few years, but that's been due to a lot of users complaining about the overall quality of stories on the site (look at the comments for some older stories Dating Game and Cry Baby Lane for example). We have over 10k stories here and a number are of questionable quality. Programs like the writer's workshop have been set up to help authors that are starting out/having issues (I've used it myself a number of times). As we're trying to improve the overall quality of stories on the site, it's necessary to draw a line between stories that need work and stories that the author put time into. If you want an example of what happens when there are little to no standards, pop on over to the creepypasta land wiki and look at a few of those stories and note the comments/lack thereof. I think we're taking steps in the right direction, but that's just my opinion.