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Sphinn Home » Sphinn Zone
Sphinn spam - some solutions
Sphinn Zone News Source: http://scienceforseo.blogspot.com
Story Found By: Misscj 1289 Days ago
Category: Sphinn Zone
A simple low-down of what some of the options are for dealing with Sphinn spam. I’ve looked at topics ranging from moderation, to relevance rank and begging.
 Comments7 Comments  

Comments

Avatar Administrator
from dannysullivan 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 2

<div>To the solutions suggested....</div><div>Having a human spam editor: We do this already. We have a team of moderators where virtually most of their time is spent killing spam. Getting users to flag spam: We do this already. Use the Report as Spam link. We put this in place months ago. It does help. I encourage more people to use it. Moderation: See above.Captcha (not effective for human submissions): We do this already.Relevance rank and finally...personalisation: Sphinn is being entirely rebuilt, as we’ve blogged about before. Part of that will be a way to filter out what’s new to things that your friends are submitting or sphinning. It’s just not something we can bring up overnight. But it is coming. We think Sphinn 2.0 will be pretty cool, not just as it should help reduce spam but also help increase the number of high quality stories that appear in your feeds and on the site.</div>

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from andymurd 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Danny, I got some way towards training a bayesian filter for Sphinn spam but its really hard without a feed of known spam. Is there any chance of providing one?See my comment on the blog post for more details (when it gets approved by the moderator).

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from robwatts 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Danny, how about a "this comment is spam" option and setting it so that trusted users say above a threshold of x sphinns, submits, hots etc can effectively hide them...

Avatar Administrator
from dannysullivan 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Rob, honestly, we don’t get a lot of spam comments. It’s a tiny amount, and I think we nip them in the bud pretty quickly.Andy, we have an entire backroom full of spam. But it’s not really worth the time to be building that out for the existing platform. We’re doing an entire from the ground up rebuild, which should hopefully bring up a new Sphinn with all types of features by March/April.One thing that Rob’s going to announce more formally soon is that to submit, you’ll have to have an avatar. Spammers don’t bother with them. So, it’s one more barrier we can easily toss at them.

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from amitnyamtabad 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Hi Danny, we all know since Pligg is opensource and there are a lot of blackhat tools to spam sites based on the pligg platform so why not work on some custom platform, again it is just my suggestion.

Avatar Administrator
from Michelle 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@amitnyamtabad - We are building a completely new, custom developed platform. It is not based on Pligg - at all - and will share no code between the platforms.  Also, as has been mentioned before, we have significantly altered our Pligg installation. It is not stock and thus is not subject to many, many of the Pligg exploits that are out there. From our registration process, to restrictions on new account submissions.  That being said - no platform is foolproof.  Spam does get through, will continue to get through, and will likely show up even with the new system.  And we will continue to combat it through a variety of methods.  If you see something that is spam, please, hit the "Report Spam" button. It only takes a few users to help the mods keep our community clean. 

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from andymurd 1288 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Danny & Michelle, it’s great to hear that you are addressing the concerns of users. Spam is highlighted time and again as a problem on Sphinn and that means that you are getting the basics right!A custom Pligg is the way to go - if two of you are being chased by a hungry tiger, you don’t have to outrun the tiger, just the other guy! And filtering out people without an avatar is an easy win.I’d love for you to share your back room full of spam. In the web 2.0 world spam is no longer about casinos & pills, but it’s off-topic or hateful or sexist or racist or... holidays... or outsourcing... or... I think that contextual filtering is the way to go and I’d love to be able to develop my ideas further. You have my email if you want to arrange to post me a DVD full of Sphinn spam ;-)

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