Timeline for Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
73 events
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| Jan 3, 2023 at 10:01 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek Mod | We don't 'need' to be told what to do - we can decide on that as needs be. We need better tools to do or better yet, better way not to need to help clean up spam profiles | |
| Jan 3, 2023 at 10:01 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek Mod | I'd note that manual destruction totally does not scale very well. I think in this instance I was talking about hundreds of pages, and informally there's dozens of keywords to check through, and deleting them is slightly rate limited. The goal here is to save on moderator hours should a moderator choose to deal with the issue, and is a request for better tools (which needs intervention and dev time from the company), not policy requests (I've deleted mid-high 4 digits of users on this site alone, and more on SU). | |
| Jan 3, 2023 at 9:30 | comment | added | Joachim | This question asks for better tools, not for a policy. VTLO. | |
| Jan 3, 2023 at 6:49 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jan 3, 2023 at 9:54 | |||||
| Jan 3, 2023 at 6:30 | comment | added | tripleee | Does this answer your question? What is the policy on destroying users with very spammy profiles but have not posted spam yet? | |
| Jan 24, 2022 at 7:14 | history | edited | Journeyman GeekMod | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 14, 2021 at 4:22 | comment | added | Martin | The issue was recently brought up on MathOverflow Meta: Influx of ridiculous number of spam users – what to do? | |
| S Feb 19, 2021 at 12:03 | history | bounty ended | CommunityBot | ||
| S Feb 19, 2021 at 12:03 | history | notice removed | CommunityBot | ||
| S Feb 11, 2021 at 10:34 | history | bounty started | Luuklag | ||
| S Feb 11, 2021 at 10:34 | history | notice added | Luuklag | Draw attention | |
| S Jul 26, 2019 at 9:57 | history | bounty ended | Martin | ||
| S Jul 26, 2019 at 9:57 | history | notice removed | Martin | ||
| S Jul 19, 2019 at 6:15 | history | bounty started | Martin | ||
| S Jul 19, 2019 at 6:15 | history | notice added | Martin | Draw attention | |
| S Mar 26, 2018 at 12:39 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
'Stack Overflow' is the legal name; spelling; grammar; layout. Folksy touches intentional so reverted that bit
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| S Mar 26, 2018 at 12:39 | history | suggested | user386941 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
'Stack Overflow' is the legal name; spelling; grammar; layout.
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| Mar 26, 2018 at 12:06 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Mar 26, 2018 at 12:39 | |||||
| Dec 13, 2017 at 3:11 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 13, 2017 at 0:50 | comment | added | Bhargav Rao | @Derpy, yes, I wasn't speaking about the others. Just the insurance ones. | |
| S Dec 12, 2017 at 13:55 | history | suggested | anonymous2 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Fixed spelling
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| Dec 12, 2017 at 13:52 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Dec 12, 2017 at 13:55 | |||||
| S Dec 12, 2017 at 10:26 | history | bounty ended | gnat | ||
| S Dec 12, 2017 at 10:26 | history | notice removed | gnat | ||
| Dec 11, 2017 at 11:10 | comment | added | ꓢPArcheon | @BhargavRao nope, just looked at the new users here on meta. No car insurance, but we get other kind of spam profiles | |
| Dec 10, 2017 at 8:47 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek | There also seem to be a handful of profiles with the word finance in them, only 3 pages on SU | |
| Dec 8, 2017 at 18:44 | comment | added | Bhargav Rao | Looks like it stopped. For the past 3 days, I don't see any new profiles (Disc: I do track new users on creation) | |
| Dec 6, 2017 at 16:15 | history | edited | gnat |
edited tags
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| Dec 6, 2017 at 12:56 | comment | added | doppelgreener | Now 529 pages for 19,000 spam profiles. | |
| S Dec 5, 2017 at 10:25 | history | bounty started | gnat | ||
| S Dec 5, 2017 at 10:25 | history | notice added | gnat | Authoritative reference needed | |
| Dec 5, 2017 at 9:58 | history | edited | iBug says Reinstate Monica | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Grammar
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| Dec 5, 2017 at 6:32 | comment | added | ItamarG3 | Seems like nearly every site has been hit. yikes | |
| Dec 5, 2017 at 4:40 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 4, 2017 at 12:28 | answer | added | Buffy | timeline score: 6 | |
| Dec 2, 2017 at 17:18 | comment | added | Mokubai | Superuser now has 396+ pages of this, for a estimate of somewhere north of 14,000 spam profiles. This isn't slowing down any time soon. | |
| Dec 1, 2017 at 13:47 | comment | added | Rand al'Thor | @6'whitemale I just tried a Google search for "car insurance stack exchange", and the 5th hit was a spammer's profile. | |
| Nov 30, 2017 at 16:51 | comment | added | ChrisF Mod | A variation on the theme - meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/360042/possible-spam-accounts | |
| Nov 30, 2017 at 6:41 | comment | added | PolyGeo | Six hours later fellow mod @HarryVervet has destroyed another 7 at Genealogy while I've found that 6 more have been created at GIS. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 22:47 | comment | added | PolyGeo | I just destroyed 6 on Genealogy & Family History and 15 on Geographic Information Systems. To find them I searched Users for 'insurance'. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 20:40 | comment | added | Narusan | We have 20 on Health.SE These are the UIDs | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 19:27 | comment | added | Vincent | At GDSE, we've also found lots of spam accounts whose name ends in the substring 'Hoo1'. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 18:10 | comment | added | DarkCygnus | I am positive that with all the data SE should have available even a simple SPAM filter could be developed here (with Naive Bayes for example, the out-of-the-box implementation for that)... I really hope this spam profiles are being saved somehow for analysis... I see that the spam is no new story, and that in the past the community was open to considering spam filter ideas ... are we still open for such thing? A spam filter could also be applied to posts from users with few interactions, in case it was needed. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 14:17 | answer | added | doppelgreener | timeline score: 28 | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 10:45 | comment | added | Glorfindel Mod | They've finally started to post actual spam. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 4:28 | comment | added | Monica Cellio | I've deleted a bunch on each of the five sites where I have diamonds. I'd say it's network-wide by now. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 3:44 | history | edited | Laurel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 29, 2017 at 3:10 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 29, 2017 at 3:09 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek | I've edited to point out this is a network wide issue. I've mentioned SO specifically because, yanno. Debating adding a list of affected sites but eventually I suspect they've hit everyone. | |
| Nov 29, 2017 at 3:03 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 29, 2017 at 2:57 | comment | added | Robotnik | I'd like to note it's not just SU, I've seen this on Arqade today. I came to Meta SE to alert on this but you've beat me to the punch. | |
| Nov 28, 2017 at 15:51 | answer | added | Monica Cellio | timeline score: 101 | |
| Nov 28, 2017 at 7:07 | comment | added | Nate Eldredge | @Mokubai: Some sites show recent badges in the sidebar on the main page (e.g. mathoverflow.net), and in this case, spammers can get their spammy account name seen by everybody, with the full ad if they click. | |
| Nov 28, 2017 at 4:22 | answer | added | Ilmari Karonen | timeline score: 44 | |
| Nov 28, 2017 at 1:39 | history | edited | bwDraco | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 28, 2017 at 1:37 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 27, 2017 at 23:49 | comment | added | Journeyman Geek | @RobertCartaino Not really worth the time manually nuking these for me. Maybe when I'm really bored but after about 200 or so... I got really bored. It is a problem we've made the CM team aware of in the past, and some mitigations are in place. These crafty chaps seem to actually adapted to the lack of links, and have roughly the same MO.... | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 23:48 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 27, 2017 at 21:40 | comment | added | Mokubai | @Catija yeah, seems that Super User is bearing the brunt of it and random other sites are getting "linked" accounts, all of which are hidden. Presumably this is a measure to make it easier to recreate the spam accounts. | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 21:31 | comment | added | Catija | I have some of them popping in on IPS, too... and they're "hiding" their accounts... which seems like they're trying to obscure what they're doing. | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 16:49 | comment | added | Robert Cartaino | Fair enough.... | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 16:44 | comment | added | user315433 | @RobertCartaino Google bot is paging through those listings, and indexing them (which is the whole point of these profiles; stuffing keywords in there so that search for those words leads to phone numbers). If Google starts thinking of SU as a keyword-stuffing spammy site, that won't help SU's search rankings. | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 16:33 | comment | added | Mokubai | @RobertCartaino Okay not a lot of people may browse to the badges page on a regular basis but the fact that a lot of spam shows up there makes it a real issue to me rather than a non-issue. From that page it makes it look like we accept spam in this form and that we actively reward it by giving it a badge, much like Twitter and their "verified" badge being mistaken for their acceptance of unsavoury people rather than the real meaning of "they are who they are"... | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 16:19 | comment | added | Mokubai | @RobertCartaino not actively hunting it, but I noticed it while looking at a badge I was awarded and saw a lot of new "autobiographer" badges being awarded to spam profiles. Check the right hand side, still more spam being seeded: superuser.com/help/badges | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 16:12 | comment | added | Robert Cartaino | Devil's advocate here, but who's paging through new-user listings to see what kind of random noise inactive non-users have left in their profile? Does anybody see it? Is there a use case to browse through profiles with ZERO content? This feels like a "if a tree falls in the woods..." situation to me, but maybe it gets fixed. I just hope you're not spending any time actively seeking this out to clean up what feels like a non-issue — unless I am missing something here. | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:40 | answer | added | Mad Scientist | timeline score: 187 | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:34 | answer | added | Nissa | timeline score: -1 | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:32 | history | edited | user315433 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:18 | comment | added | doppelgreener | That is 164 pages of car insurance spam profiles, and 36 per page for ~5,900 total. Good grief... | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:08 | history | edited | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:06 | history | edited | user |
Better tags
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| Nov 27, 2017 at 15:01 | comment | added | ArtOfCode | Get a goat that doesn't run away so much :P | |
| Nov 27, 2017 at 14:59 | history | asked | Journeyman Geek | CC BY-SA 3.0 |