The spam brigade has finally struck home!
Yes, it IS rather incestuous if not outright cannibalistic to point to my own blog post about Sphinn right here on Sphinn. However, since I can’t upload any screenshots here and as I’m assuming that the spam posts detected and at issue in this article will soon be removed by the moderators (as well they should be), here’s the documentation FWIW.
8 Comments
Yes, it IS rather incestuous if not outright cannibalistic to point to my own blog post about Sphinn right here on Sphinn. However, since I can’t upload any screenshots here and as I’m assuming that the spam posts detected and at issue in this article will soon be removed by the moderators (as well they should be), here’s the documentation FWIW.
8 Comments
Comments
I think the number of spam killers should be extended. There are enough trusted, mature users of this site who would use such power in a judicial manner. Come on guys, more mods please.
I agree Lyndon, I’m sure many people would step up to the plate to help out Heck even I would do it
Yep...all the spamfighters are at SES...I see three live spams on the "What’s New" page.
Sad but not surprising, which is perhaps the saddest part of all.
It’s got to be said, the What’s New page has more spam than your average Monty Python sketch at the moment. That is, unless there are some very subtle SEM titles in there that go whoosh over my head.
Seriously, two spam submissions and the sky is falling? We have mods, and they regularly wipe stuff out. Yep, plenty of people are at a conference right now, and as is the case for any forum during those types of times, the spammers tend to come out more. I’m sure spam submissions will get worse -- Ralph, you’re simply stating things I’ve already said, that any site that gets popular will attract spam. The difference is that you won’t see me crying about it. We’ll just step up having to deal with it in various ways. As I already stated when I launched the site, I tend not to apply a ton of rules and a heavy hand to let the site grow organically. I’ve already covered that we might bring in the bury system so that users themselves can kill off stuff that gets through -- but that brings in other issues on whether those buries have to be shown to the public, and I wanted to have a proper discussion on that before implementing it. So if the cost is a little more spam makes it through between times that the mods do indeed catch it and kill it, I thought that was a fair tradeoff to make.
What about putting people on mod preview by default, and letting them out of it once they’ve demonstrated that the items they submit are relevant -- 5, maybe 10 submissions. That way, spam submissions will never see the light of day, and members like Ralph and myself won’t have to look upon such things :)
It’s difficult to not allow new people to post. If they can’t post to What’s New, then how do people see anything to decide if it’s good or not? We have talked about limiting people who are new to maybe one post per day until they’ve proven themselves in some way. To be honest, however, off-topic spam is not the problem. To be, mediocre submissions are the bigger worry, where so-so new stuff could make it harder to find the better new stuff. I’m aware of this, and can simply repeat what I said before -- we’re looking at stuff such as a view of What’s New by items that your friends have sphunn that might help. I’m also considering other ideas and will start a fresh thread on them when we get closer to testing them, for feedback. Right now, there’s more noise than before, but there’s still plenty of signal, and I definitely want to work to make sure the signal stays strong.