Sphinn - Banned From Sphinn? No Worries, Your Vote Counts Either Way

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Banned From Sphinn? No Worries, Your Vote Counts Either Way

Went Hot: February 23, 2008 - 6:08 pm
Posted By: mvandemar 232 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com)
Category: Sphinn Zone

Apparently you don't actually have to be a member in good standing to help a story go hot on Sphinn these days.

12 Comments

Who Desphunn This (0)

Comments

from planetc1 232 days ago #

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To this day, if I see an avatar on Sphinn that is default green, I think Spammer. It's one of the easist steps a user can take from differentiating themselves from the crowd.

from MattMcGee 232 days ago #

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When we killspam a user, it removes their profile, submissions, and comments. It doesn't remove their votes. I'm no programmer, but I assume there are programmatical reasons for this.

from dannysullivan 232 days ago #

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I've never seen that "user spammed" message before, probably because as a mod, I get a different screen. That should be changed to just say an account was terminated, and I've passed that along.

Not sure about the votes -- again, will check on that. Was a good story it seemed, though.

from mvandemar 232 days ago #

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@Danny, personally I think maybe it was an ok story, but my point was more towards how much something as small as that can affect whether or not a story goes hot.

from Michelle 232 days ago #

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@Matt - I'm not sure we want to penalize submitters of good content by taking away votes on their articles, because whomever voted for a good article then goes on to submit spam to Sphinn. It's penalizing two for the actions of one. Killspamming is generally targeted at removing content spam - it's more rare that we are killspamming puppet accounts and those are easily noticed anyway.

Also, I've not run the numbers, but probably over 90% of the stuff we killspam and the accounts we disable have only done one thing - submitted spam - usually just one or two articles. No votes, no comments, they are drive by spammers. But if the consensus is - remove their votes too - yep, easily done.

from gabs 232 days ago #

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Pligg doesn't remove vote from deleted/blocked accounts.. Its not yet that advanced..

from Michelle 232 days ago #

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@gabs - Pligg doesn't do a lot of what we have Sphinn doing ;-) And we've already significantly customized the way killspam works so adding in the vote removal wouldn't be an issue - but I don't think we'll be doing that for the reasons outlined above.

from mvandemar 232 days ago #

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@Michelle - often times though spammers will "contribute" to a social media venue in order to hide the fact that they are indeed spammers, such as with meaningless comments... do you really think that someone whose main goal in coming here was spamming actually took the time to only contribute to worthwhile articles?

I mean, no way to know, of course... but if you're going to remove comments as well then it probably makes sense to remove everything.

from SpostareDuro 231 days ago #

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I think it shouldn't go unnoticed that Bill had just made the 'sock puppet' point in our "Desphinn" argument...Uh, er, umm..Dunno...Maybe this is already a sign?

from LocalHound 231 days ago #

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These are the kinds of stories that always seem to crop up on weekends and make sphinn a fun place on a Saturday night... Oh my God, I need to get a life.

Also, may need to think about changing the color of my avatar... all this talk about spam and green avatars is getting me a little paranoid. :)

from baiduyou 230 days ago #

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I think a lot of the new members voting for the story were people who had been involved in the invitation/rejection fiasco.

from mvandemar 230 days ago #

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@baiduyou - in this instance that was my first assumption as well, and that probably is the case. I wasn't trying to say that particular story was spam, just pointing out a quirk in the process.