Clean up the Bots off KA

Hi Emma,

Thanks for reaching out about this!

I went through your discussion history and removed the off-topic comments from others that you've flagged. I also checked out the other profiles involved and I didn't see anything that indicated bot activity or fake accounts. They all appeared to be legitimate users that, unfortunately, were simply making low-quality posts.

We actually already have a captcha system in place (it's pretty hidden though, so most legitimate users will never see it), as well as fairly strict requirements in order to be able to make discussion posts.

If you happen to run into any content that violates our Community Guidelines, please flag the posts for moderator attention so we can review and remove them. If you see any behavior or accounts that are particularly alarming, you're also welcome to reach out to us via a support ticket.

Thanks for your help improving our community!

Kindly,

Evan Lewis

Thanks for checking it out, it was just starting to get a bit annoying lol they seem to do it more to answers that get more upvotes or longer answers or comments which you can't always explain things in a few sentences lol. Thanks again.

This continues to be a real and significant problem.  Those users who are posting useless, usually long, posts make it impossible to get any real value from the comments in virtually every single topic I have studied at Khan Academy.  If I try to read comments for my own help or to potentially help others, I find that real content is completely lost amongst the command line drawings or just posts with repeated characters many thousands of times in the post.

When I first looked into the Khan communities, I was surprised how few real posts there were.  In a social world with so many young people, I would expect to see a vibrant, active, and helpful community but, when you look at the forums, within the first page of threads you get back many months.  Very few are actually trying to use the community.

These posts take away from the learning opportunity of students who are working hard to get an education and behaving responsibly while doing so.  In any physical school, behavior that would interfere with other student's ability or opportunity to learn would not, or at least should not, be tolerated and it should not be at Khan Academy as well. 

Just as they have implemented positive feedback through badges, awards, and other positive response to good work, Khan Academy should respond to inappropriate behavior with appropriate responses as well.  It makes sense to me to start with warnings, followed by suspensions from commenting or community, followed by even suspensions from the site. 

I realize how important it is for even those students posting low-quality posts to have access to an online education and I think it is wonderful that Khan Academy provides that opportunity; thank you for that. If you even just start with warnings and, if still needed, community or comment suspensions, you could have a trial at cleaning up and improving community without significantly threatening the opportunity to learn for even those students creating the problem. 

Overall, in life, I find that most people will live up to expectations if expectations are clearly set.  Please consider setting expectations for those who are distracting so much from what should be a very valuable and helpful community.

Yeh it's all over on every video, i know for a fact a lot of these accounts are bots too because they aren't doing anything they aren't doing any of the practise problems or anything in any of the courses they're only commenting.

Some aren't bots who are replying with some real comments and doing the stuff in the courses but there isn't a good culture encouraged in schools either, rather than encouraging them to learn, to try, persist, and take things on board no matter what it is... that there's even a possibility something could help them they tell them that isn't right and encourage them to make fun of it instead, it's pretty bizarre.

A simple CAPTCHA to be able to post a comment will fix this issue, i know there's a lot of kids on this too but they don't know what to really ask i find the best comments come from students a bit older, so it would deter them from posting comments they don't need to post but mostly it will stop the bot accounts from being able to comment, online forums have the same issue so obviously they have to bot proof it it's been an issue for years.

We've got the AI now but it's still useful having comments because some things can't be explained by the AI, it can't explain some bits and pieces that require more human intuition to be able to understand it and explain it because it's not well covered online whether people didn't want to or didn't think to cover it, so if comments are to be kept it needs to be more secure.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, dalepres! I completely agree with your ideas, and the community you've described is exactly the kind of community we're trying to foster at Khan Academy.

The current foundation for our community expectations is our Community Guidelines. When users do not follow our guidelines, we send out warning messages explaining the guidelines and asking them to correct their behavior, and then remove their discussion privileges if the issues persist.

We've recently launched some new internal tools that I believe will help to improve the quality of discussions, and we're also going to be looking at revising our automated filter of posts to be more strict and to catch some of the ASCII art posts that we've been seeing lately.

Additionally, over the summer we are going through all of the content items in the most high-traffic and problematic courses and are working to clean up the discussions in these courses. As an example of this, check out the Early Math Review course.

I'm very optimistic that these changes and special projects will lead to a noticeable improvement in discussion quality in the coming months. If you have any additional ideas, or if you notice any new problematic trends, I'm here to listen to them!