Car of the Future (1950)

 

Viafoura moderates the comments on GoComics… NOT GoComics!!!!

 NOT GoComics!!!!  NOT GoComics!!!!

Instead of using the words… client or site publisher… I will say GoComics. 

Instead of saying  “user” or “end user”, I will add the word “victim”.)

Here’s all the pretty words Viafoura says about itself:

“Viafoura employs a hybrid AI and human moderation system known as Moderation Intelligence to ensure brand safety and civility at scale. This system combines AI-powered automated filters with 24/7 human expert oversight, customized to each client's specific community guidelines. The AI component utilizes semantic pattern-based detection and machine learning to analyze user-generated content in real time. It identifies and automatically blocks spam, hate speech, harassment, and toxic content with over 99% accuracy. The system is designed to learn from human overrides, continuously improving its precision and reducing the need for manual moderation as it adapts to the specific nuances of a publisher's audience.” (Insert Church Lady’s… “Well, isn’t that special?”)

I’ll skip most of GoComics’s experience with Viafoura, because… like most companies involved in moderation… they skew positive, presenting themselves to GoComics and other clients as problem-solvers… instead of THE PROBLEM.  Viafoura’s primary motivation is to maintain a good relationship with GoComics (who pays them). Their concern with end-users (who I refer to as “victims”) aren’t even an afterthought. In a nutshell, Viafoura only cares about GoComic’s perspective… and GoComics is itself a proxy for the end-user/“victim’s” experience, not a direct measure of it. The "95% of comments removed, a stat from Viafoura's own blog, is telling in that they acknowledge the vast majority of removals target a victim’s own content, but they never publish the inverse: how many of those removals were wrong. Without an appeal mechanism, that number is unknowable by anyone outside Viafoura’s moderation team.

The absence of an appeal process for victims is arguably the single most important gap — not the false-positive rate (which is tunable per client/GoComics), but the fact that a user who is wrongfully flagged has no path to correction. 

End user/victim complaints are essentially invisible. There is no public record of direct end-user/victim complaints regarding Viafoura's moderation. No Reddit threads, no social media posts, no forum discussions where an individual says “My comment on GoComics got deleted and I don't know why" or "I got banned from GoComics’s comments and I can't appeal." This is expected for a few reasons:

• Users don't know Viafoura exists. They experience it as “GoComics deleted my comment." Any complaint goes to GoComics, not to Viafoura.
• There is no documented appeal mechanism for end users/victims. Viafoura documentation (https://documentation.viafoura.com/docs/user-ban) shows a "message to user" field that moderators can attach to a ban, and the JavaScript API (https://documentation.viafoura.com/docs/viafoura-javascript-api-2) exposes ban_level and a reason string. But there's no "appeal this decision" button, no "request a review" flow, no second-chance mechanism. Compare this to Meta, YouTube, Reddit, and Roblox, all of which have explicit, documented appeal processes with transparency reports.
• The data export documentation tracks comment statuses (disabled, deleted, spammed) and user ban events, but there's no field for "user appealed" or "appeal outcome." The system has no concept of a user/victim-initiated review.

So the "victims" of over-sensitive moderation — the users whose legitimate comments get flagged, whose accounts get banned, whose contributions get ghost-banned (viafoura's ghost ban level allows a user/victim to leave a post, but only the moderators can see it) — have no means to register a complaint, let alone appeal.

Here’s what the experience chain for a victim looks like:

1. End user gets a comment deleted or gets banned. They don't know why. They might try again, get flagged again, and then stop commenting entirely — or they post about it on social media directed at GoComics, not at Viafoura.
2. GoComics notices declining comment volume, gets a buttload of reader/victim emails (“Why did you delete my comment?"), or catches one or two individual cases during their daily moderation review.
3. GoComics files a ticket with Viafoura — and that's when the complaint enters the record, reframed as a product issue ("the AI is too sensitive to X type of content") rather than an end-user/victim experience issue ("I was wrongfully censored and had no recourse").

This means the GoComics/client-side complaint is already filtered, aggregated, and depersonalized by the time it reaches Viafoura. The individual user/victim’s experience of being silenced — the actual harm — is invisible in every public dataset.

What's structurally missing

Dimension	Meta / YouTube / Reddit	Viafoura
User-facing notification with reason	Yes (detailed, per-policy)	"Message to user" field (set by moderator, often generic)
Appeal mechanism	Yes (documented, with SLAs)	None documented
Transparency report (false-positive rate, appeals filed/granted)	Yes (quarterly/annual)	None
User/victim can see why their comment was flagged	Partially (policy citation)	Only if moderator writes a custom message
Ghost ban disclosure	Varies (some platforms disclose)	User is not informed; their posts are hidden

Viafoura's ban levels include a ghost level where "the user is able to perform all normal actions, but their comments and replies are only visible to themselves and moderators." The user/victim has no idea their contributions are invisible to everyone else. They may keep posting, thinking they're participating in a conversation that no one else can see. There's no documented mechanism to notify Viafoura or let a ghosted user/victim appeal.

Viafoura’s user/victim ban levels:

1. Disables the users/victims from submitting any new comments or replies. They will be able to do other engagement activities (likes, follow, report, etc).

2. User/victim is able to perform all normal actions, but their comments and replies are only visible to themselves and moderators.

3. Disabled the user/victim from logging in and performing all actions that require authentication (like, dislike, report, etc).

4. In addition to banning the user/victim, this will ensure all their posts are hidden from view of other users.

5. User is not banned.

A little off-topic, but something that happens in certain moderation companies… they solicit reviews of their service by offering gift cards as an incentive to leave a positive review. (I’m guessing that bad reviews just don’t appear, despite getting a gift card.) To my knowledge, Viafoura does NOT offer gift cards in order to get positive reviews of their services, but they still suppress a lot of data and goings-on… labeling it proprietary information.

Hope this helps. I think I confused myself several times trying to explain things. The main takeaway... GoComics does not really moderate GoComics anymore (they can override certain actions, I suppose), but they 100% get all the blame when the an end-user/victim is unhappy.

Fun with Photoshop (Clay Jones)

I like Clay (and he knows that), so any misconstrued intent or misinterpretation is just that. This was an unintentional and accidental pairing of two separate images that resulted in a little harmless Photoshop fun on my part. I also decided not to lop off the odd bit of blue fabric on Clay's shoulder since it looks like either an epaulette or a dishwashing scrub pad.

VOTE: 

Epaulette or Dishwashing Scrub Pad?

 

Steller's Sea Eagle vs Bald Eagle

The Steller’s Sea Eagle is significantly larger than the Bald Eagle. 

Size and Weight: The Steller’s Sea Eagle is the heaviest eagle in the world, with females weighing up to 9.5 kg (21 lbs) and a wingspan reaching 2.5 meters (8.2 feet). In contrast, the Bald Eagle is smaller, with females typically weighing around 6.3 kg (14 lbs) and a maximum wingspan of 2.44 meters (8.0 feet). 

Physical Differences: Beyond sheer mass, the Steller’s Sea Eagle has a larger, more robust yellow bill and bare legs, whereas the Bald Eagle has a smaller bill and feathered legs down to its feet. 

The Steller’s Sea Eagle also features darker plumage with white shoulders and tail, while the Bald Eagle is distinguished by its white head and tail.

 

Ready for Winter!

Lightning Hazard Map

I have a friend whose mother was killed by lightning (or indirectly killed.) Her death wasn't instantaneous. She worked in a doctor's office and while walking from the parking lot (a short walk from her car) into the doctor's building, she was struck.  She died three days later.  A year or so before she had, apparently and successfully, fought off cancer (colon cancer, I think). She was in the clear having completed all her chemo and radiation treatments. Cancer-free!!! It's all hard to fathom, but the lightning strike, apparently, awakened her cancer 10 tenfold +. It ravished her body and she died. I'm sort of skeptical, but I'm not going to challenge my friend's belief that this is what happened to his mother.

-----Still, I did some additional research on my own:

"There is no scientific evidence that a lightning strike can awaken dormant cancer. The documented effects of a lightning strike are primarily neurological, cardiac, and thermal — including brain injury, seizures, cardiac arrest, burns, and long-term cognitive issues — but none of the medical literature links the electrical discharge to reactivating dormant tumor cells.

While research (e.g., from the Wistar Institute) has shown that stress hormones can awaken dormant cancer cells, the extreme acute stress of a lightning strike has never been shown to produce this effect in any documented case. The mechanism identified involves sustained elevation of norepinephrine and specific proteins (S100A8/A9) in immune cells over time, not a single electrical event.

There are a few unverified anecdotal reports of lightning "curing" chronic conditions (including one 1932 claim of cancer remission), but these are not supported by medical evidence and are considered coincidences or misdiagnoses."

Orange Church of God

The Orange Church of God-Embassy of Grace is a Pentecostal place of worship located in Orange, Texas.  The church has been in business for over 20 years and identifies with the Church of God denomination.

 Even though the church is real, this sign appears to be AI-generated. (Thanks @JungleGeorge for raising this possibility and prompting me to do some more research.) I am embarrassed to be fooled, but I won't erase this post for that reason. I think it is important to show that we all make mistakes and we should face up to them...