Thanks to Richard Logan, who engaged my services to clean out the spam here, we now have control as a community to keep the spammers at bay. At the bottom of each post here, you will see a button labeled Report Spam. Please use it responsibly.
Depending on how many posts you have ever made here, you will have a variable amount of “authority” to remove things immediately. If you’re relatively new here, you will need to be one of several people who click on the same message (you can only vote once per message) in order to see it removed.
I have removed quite a few of the essay spammers, and the way this is gamed, there is little chance that the same people will return. (I have little doubt that the actual same people will return, they appear to be paid to do this, but they will have to sign up for a new account each time, and they will have relatively no authority to moderate spam, so there’s little risk of backlash.
That said, if you notice messages being moderated that should not be, please let me know. The way this works, nothing is actually deleted, and I can fiddle with the algorithm to make it harder to game if we notice a pattern of abuse.
Finally, because the Web forum (where I have this kind of control) is a peer to the other members of the mailing list (it gets mailed each time a message is posted, just like the other list members), this system won’t keep first-time spammers from reaching the mailing list. But it should make the whole prospect so high-drag and low-value that they give up and move on to an easier target.
Walter
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Many thanks Walter and Richard. I notice that the ‘report spam’ option only seems to appear on the forum itself and not at the end of individual email messages sent out. Might it be possible to add a link to the email messages as well?
Gordon
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Sorry, that’s just not possible. The messages that are sent to the mailing list are processed through GNU Mailman, and they precede the messages that appear on the web. The way that the system is architected, the web interface is just another “user” subscribed to the list, so it gets the same message any other subscriber would, and then parses it to create the web view.
Walter
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On the web interface, navigating through threads in a topic area. I get blank pages with “Not Found” as the only text. For instance, in Off topic, I start with the thread “[Pro] 360 Degree Rotating Image”. Then I click “previous thread” and get the Not Found. Then, I’m stuck having to go back to the “[Pro] 360 Degree Rotating Image” thread and/or to the thread list to get anywhere.
Ideally, the web interface would either skip the empty thread or it at least would give a page that would allow me to continue to navigate. The first option would be better since the deleted thread isn’t in the thread list, either.
Thanks again, the place looks better already!
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I’m noticing that the “Date updated” column in the web view continues to reflect the latest spam post even though it has been deleted/hidden. For example the “[Pro] 360 Degree Rotating Image” thread contains visible posts dated from 4 Apr 2009, 6:56pm to 7 Apr 2009, 7:25pm, yet the thread is posted at the top of the “Off Topic” list with an updated date of 29 Dec 2017, 9:31am applied giving the impression this is the most recently updated thread in that section. Is there any way this can be reverted back to 7 Apr 2009?
Gordon
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Joe, I fixed the next/previous link problem (they were not screening out the spam messages). Gordon, I will look at the updated date next. It should be fix-able.
Walter
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Joe, I fixed the next/previous link problem (they were not screening out the spam messages).
Nice.
I just tried something - I searched for “essay” using the search field (that was the first kind of spam that I could think of) and some results came up that were spam. Of course, when I clicked on them, I got the Not Found page. It would be nice if the search results hid the spam posts as well, right?
I’m just trying to think of any ways that someone might encounter a Not Found page. The only other way I can think of ATM is links to threads that are not shown, such as the one in Freeway User’s post in the thread in OT.
Yep - and when you seek for “People” (some of them are from adelaide and do cleaning) they have often contact infos and even descriptions of their crafts there. Perhaps those accounts should be removed as well?
Cheers
Thomas
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I just had a thought based on what I saw in an OT thread about a post being reported as spam that was not. Is there a warning that appears when you select “Report Spam”?^ I kind of wonder if there should be one that says something like, “Are you sure? Please do not use the ‘Report Spam’ link for posts that are not unsolicited advertising.” I don’ know if you’d want to mention to not use it to report other content that people might have a problem with such as profanity, abuse, or other content.
^ I haven’t tried the Report Spam link because I didn’t want to submit something as spam just as a test if there was no way to back out of it.
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No, there isn’t any warning, and there ought to be. Thanks for reminding me.
Walter
On Jan 11, 2018, at 8:54 AM, Joe Muscara email@hidden wrote:
I just had a thought based on what I saw in an OT thread about a post being reported as spam that was not. Is there a warning that appears when you select “Report Spam”?^ I kind of wonder if there should be one that says something like, “Are you sure? Please do not use the ‘Report Spam’ link for posts that are not unsolicited advertising.” I don’ know if you’d want to mention to not use it to report other content that people might have a problem with such as profanity, abuse, or other content.
^ I haven’t tried the Report Spam link because I didn’t want to submit something as spam just as a test if there was no way to back out of it.
It’s there now, but I’m similarly afraid to press the button on someone nice. I can reverse the effect, but there’s a lot of places to change it (logs, the message, and the person who wrote the message).
Walter
On Jan 12, 2018, at 7:37 AM, Joe Muscara email@hidden wrote:
Let me know when it’s there so I can try it! I want to try it but don’t want to accidentally report anyone.
I got a chance to use it! Edward Myers popped up in the off-topic list with a generous offer to help close an input tag in the guise of a Law Essay firm.
Walter
On Jan 13, 2018, at 8:26 AM, Joe Muscara email@hidden wrote:
I reported some spam in the past week, but when I pressed the button, the only thing I saw was that the button got highlighted and the page moved a little.
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Which browser? I’ve used it a couple times since I made the change, and it worked both times. I nearly always use Safari.
Do you remember which thread it was? Because it may have worked, even if it didn’t look right on the screen.
Walter
On Jan 21, 2018, at 8:25 AM, Joe Muscara email@hidden wrote:
I reported some spam in the past week, but when I pressed the button, the only thing I saw was that the button got highlighted and the page moved a little.
I don’t remember for sure if this was one, but I did just report it again with the same result. I can see it has the stuff after the # in the link so I guess it worked, just that I didn’t get any feedback other than the reload & highlight.
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