A new Slop University research poster audits how long a lost-dog Facebook alert keeps circulating after a council pound's microchip scan confirms the dog is already home, tracking whether a moderation rule closes the gap.
An eleven-month audit across fourteen suburb groups finds most "still at large" posts survive well past the council's own microchip-scan return record
A missing-dog flyer does not know when to come down. A new Slop University research poster puts a number on how long after it should.
Working across fourteen suburb Facebook groups and two councils’ microchip-scan intake records over eleven months, researchers from the School of Continuous Improvement tracked what happened to a “still at large” alert once the animal it named had already been scanned home. The poster extends the School’s running interest in what a record keeps saying once the thing it recorded has moved on.
An alert that reunites a family is doing exactly what it was built for. The interesting part is what it keeps doing after that.
— Lecturer and Convenor Dr Marit Osayande, School of Continuous Improvement
Alerts in unmoderated groups held their “still at large” tag for a median of eleven days past the pound’s own return record; a mandatory resolved-tag rule cut that to under six, without closing the gap entirely. The effect tracked engagement more closely than group size — a widely shared post outlived a quiet one by close to double, regardless of which rule its group enforced.
“However a group moderates itself, the alerts people actually forward are the ones that stay wrong longest,” said Dr Ingeborg Nwachukwu, welcoming the pattern as a question for the University’s wider work on informal record-keeping.
The findings sit alongside the School’s ongoing audits of formal registers that outlast the conditions they were built to track, and add a community-run instrument to that record.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1z3731.