Just found this project as I was searching through and I know Theymos used to get staff to mod the patrol links.
As far as I know, that's the reason patrol exists. But it's a terrible amount of messages, mostly low quality, and much more than any human should deal with. At best, you can check a very small percentage.
And that was part of what they had to do, they were special staff from the moderators though as they only had the ability to delete replies from newbies (I think) and no higher ranks (though I'm not entirely sure what the patrol link does
The patrol page shows all recent posts made by Newbies. That's about it.
As far as I know, all Mods can nuke Newbies. (Nuking them means a permban that deletes all their posts)
if you downloaded the entire patrol pages, can I have a copy?
I download patrol every 5 minutes. So far I've seen at least 10 minutes history on patrol, so several of my downloads overlap. I don't keep them permanently, I have 2856 files now (10 days history, 1.5 GB, 200 MB compressed). I can upload them somewhere if you're interested. Just so you know: it's way too much data to process manually!
I want to run analytics on it to view stats on small posts (posts with less than 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 chars to check how insubstantial they are and to see if there is anything else that can be gathered from that trend) if you want to do it yourself
I highly doubt this will produce anything useful, but by all means: prove me wrong! It would be interesting to see.
(or if you know a way of downloading them from archive.org as this forum's data ends up there daily as a mirror but I think it's just the public stuff).
Archive.org won't archive patrol as often as it regenerates.