The problem there was the redesign.<p>You&#x27;ve got a bunch of, not quite AOL-level users, but they&#x27;re 45-65 and set in their ways. That means the XP and IE6. OK, not quite that bad, but close.<p>What they should have done was upgrade the tech - sure, use real frameworks. But the full-on AJAX UI &quot;upgrade&quot; was never perceived as an upgrade. Let&#x27;s look into why:<p>Problem #1:  The highest-ranking feature request since the day it went live has been &quot;to make ignore mean ignore.&quot;<p>Old behavior: I ignore userXXX, I never see anything.
Current behavior: I ignore userXXX, I see exactly the same screen space for a post from userXXX, but it&#x27;s greyed out. I still have to scroll by it. If I have two trolls arguing with each other or flooding the board with spam, all the content is pushed out of visibility at a rate of 20 posts per page click. The vertical page  consists of 80% navigation elements and &quot;Post hidden because you ignored this user.&quot;<p>#2 feature request has been to deal with the spam problem. Now that I can no longer effectively ignore users, I have userXXX1234 spamming for PennyStocksWeekly and in the unlikely event that the spammer&#x27;s account is terminated, I then have userXXX1235 signing up and spamming about &quot;Penny Stock 101 org&quot; or &quot;Ultimate Stock Alerts.&quot;<p>So Yahoo&#x27;s filtered out URLs but it has yet to implement even the most trivial Bayesian filtering against these spammers. The <i>exact same text strings</i> are used - but because there&#x27;s only a URL filter and no Bayesian filtering for obvious spam indicators, there is effectively no spam filtering on the message boards. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;207809-finance-gs&#x2F;category&#x2F;68445-reporting-abuse" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;207809-finance-gs&#x2F;categor...</a> demonstrates the presence of long-term spammers on every board.<p>And these spammers - see Problem #1 - cannot be ignored; users can ignore the words they use, but must still scroll past the large AJAX&#x2F;mobile-friendly UI around the string &quot;Post hidden because you ignored this user,&quot;<p>Old Ignore Infrastructure Fail: There (prior to the big redesign) used to be a silent 1000-user limit (500? I forget what the number was) to the length of the ignore list. When the cap was hit, the user&#x27;s account was effectively useless, unless the user wanted to manually (!) un-ignore a hundred spammer accounts in order to free up space on this list.<p>Current Infrastructure Fail: Ignore or message rating or abuse-reporting just doesn&#x27;t work. First off, the results for <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;207809-finance-gs&#x2F;category&#x2F;68433-error-messages?query=report%20abuse%20failed" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;207809-finance-gs&#x2F;categor...</a> continue to demonstrate the abuse reporting (and upvote&#x2F;downvote) mechanism does not work consistently.  This has been the case for years.<p>This data has been available to Yahoo since the big transition: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;207809-finance-gs&#x2F;filters&#x2F;top" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yahoo.uservoice.com&#x2F;forums&#x2F;207809-finance-gs&#x2F;filters...</a><p>It has been ignored for four years.<p>It continues to be ignored.<p>A once-dedicated core of high-value eyeballs has been driven away from the site.  Most of them wound up at InvestorHub - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;investorshub.advfn.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;investorshub.advfn.com&#x2F;</a> has a site design straight out of the 90s.  To these eyeballs, that was a feature, not a bug.  Limits on account creation and posting quantity mostly solved the spam problem.  They didn&#x27;t want to leave; most left only because they realized their feedback to Yahoo was being ignored.<p>tl;dr: Classic Agilista Fail mechanism.  (edit: I apologize to people who are actually being agile, rather than Doing Agile(TM)))  The finance message board teams got one or two sprints to make a new UI.  They succeeded.  The feedback was sufficiently negative and the unresolved issues large (i.e., making the ignore functionality work without breaking some underlying design assumption.  Implementing a working spam filter, not just a simple URL filter.  Moderators to deal with abuse reports) that they couldn&#x27;t be done in one sprint.<p>So none of them got done.  And the users left.