January 28, 2017 at 11:34 am
I like the look of the new layout for the forums, but I see that there still seems to be a big problem with spam. This is surprising because up until about 1-2 years ago I do not remember this being much of an issue here.
Anyway, with the amount of spam that seems to be infiltrating the various forums how hard would it be to implement a solution to report on it easier? It would be nice to be able on a forum's page to select multiple threads that are obviously spam at once and then in one click report them all as spam. Even better if once reported a reply would automatically get added to the thread in question to notify that is has been reported as such, so other users do not waste time re-reporting it.
Thanks again for the continuous work on this site. I have been coming here for years now and with the exception of the spam threads this is one of the more professional and helpful forums I have been to and I am very happy to see some of the more noticeable MVPs in this field represented on the site.
Joie Andrew
"Since 1982"
January 29, 2017 at 2:11 pm
The SPAM has always been an issue, but the last year it has gotten very bad. I am hoping that some of the scripts and SPAM checking we've added are going to help.
I hesitate to allow mass reports, since it's easy to make a mistake and click the wrong item. I've done this before, and it's a concern.
We are looking at a few other things, including some simple filtering as well as having users with sufficient points report SPAM that is hidden immediately.
January 29, 2017 at 2:24 pm
Sounds good. It is good to know that it is being looked at. I would hate for people to be turned off from the site because of bad forum threads.
Thanks for taking the time to respond! Keep up the great work!
Joie Andrew
"Since 1982"
January 29, 2017 at 3:50 pm
I do think the amount of spam has gone down recently. I know it's still a problem.
While I don't know the code, there must be a lot of different patterns to check for in a new post. The counterpoint is that the more checks that have to be done, the longer it'll take to run.
January 29, 2017 at 4:53 pm
Ed Wagner - Sunday, January 29, 2017 3:50 PMI do think the amount of spam has gone down recently. I know it's still a problem.While I don't know the code, there must be a lot of different patterns to check for in a new post. The counterpoint is that the more checks that have to be done, the longer it'll take to run.
That's one of the issues. The other thing is that we want to be able to take upgrades from the vendor, so we are working with them on better ways to handle SPAM that won't deviate from their code base too much.
January 30, 2017 at 1:28 am
Ed Wagner - Sunday, January 29, 2017 3:50 PMI do think the amount of spam has gone down recently. I know it's still a problem.While I don't know the code, there must be a lot of different patterns to check for in a new post. The counterpoint is that the more checks that have to be done, the longer it'll take to run.
Unfortunately we're dealing with humans rather than bots for the most part, and this makes the problem a lot harder to solve.
We made a couple of simple changes last week that in tests caught around 50% of the spam (and no genuine posts), but after we deployed it, the spam posts simply changed in such a way as to get around it.
There are indeed patterns that can be looked for, but reliably matching them without then blocking genuine posts is very difficult.
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