Would anyone care for some processed meat-like substance with a gelatinous glaze?

Question

Something sort of magic happened a short time ago, sometimes a graph is worth a thousand flags:

That's right, around March 28, the spam protection layer blocked about 20,000 spam attempts, mostly in the form of suggested edits, while users didn't see much of an increase in what they had to flag in order to thwart it.

The false-positive rate remained the same, less than one percent - including a surprising amount of suggested edits that attempted to 'hijack' another user's question or answer with a completely different question. Yes, people are odd.

We capture the text that we block in our log table, which as you can imagine is getting quite obese with bacon and turkey flavored spam - I was wondering if any of you would find any value in me making a public dump of what we block available every 30 days or so? If yes, in what format would it be the most useful?

This is basically what you'd get in CSV format (or XML, JSON, SQLite DB):

DateTime  WhyBlocked  BlockedText  SiteWhereItWasBlocked

The WhyBlocked field will include text contain an integer that indicates if it was a suggested edit, post denied, post hobbled, etc.

Note, I'm currently working on a tool that will allow anyone interested to meta-moderate actions that the spam system takes. You just look at lots of crap while clicking 'spam' or 'not spam' - It's something I plan to hang off the network sort of unofficial-like for a while to determine just how useful of an endeavor it turns out to be. Tracking our false positive rate currently involves me running a query once each week, and counting the number of things that probably shouldn't have been blocked, of which there are exceedingly few. As you can tell, when we get .. this sort of volume, that quickly becomes an insurmountable task. Anyway, I digress.

What use would the data have, you ask?

• You could conceivably come up with a list of the most prolifically spammed links
• Each spam bot has very specific purposes, from what I can see. Some simply determine what kind of markup your site accepts by attempting to spam, then see what renders. Categorizing these could be fun.
• Times of the day that we tend to get hit the most
• Some of it is solid comedic gold, just browsing the CSV can yield some lulz

Exporting this would be a bit of a manual process for me, so please only indicate interest if you have something beyond morbid curiosity as a motivation. No identifying information can (of course) be included, but there's plenty of interesting things you could do without it.

What say you, meta? I've released this previously - I'm wondering if it would be a useful regular thing.

Answer 1

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So?

Answer 2

Yes. This.

We in Charcoal HQ have Smoke Detector, a chatbot that hooks into the the realtime question feed and runs some Doorknob-inspired regexes to detect spam. Note that it's kinda not working right now, because servers, but nevermind about that.

Anyway, with data like this we could, in theory (and depending on dump frequency, etc) automagically adapt keywords to recent spam, tailor it to sites, specific times of day... it could be awesome. CSV would be great (as it's fairly lightweight and widely supported)

And don't forget that we're, for the most part, a community of programmers. Data is gold to us. We can poke it and prod it and do things beyond our wildest imaginations with it.

Also, another idea (far fetched): If you could, in some way, indicate what posts come from the same IP (without revealing the IP, of course), that would be even awesomer. That's really hard to do, of course, but it could be really valuable.

And hey, I want to laugh at it too.

Answer 3

This is exactly what I was asking for in my question. Personally, I'm interested in acquiring different corpuses (corpii?) for my own project. However, some of the suggested ideas in the question actually sound very interesting and I'd love to take a crack at the data to see if I could help with any of those.

Tim Post, you mention that you've released this previously. Is that previous data still available? I was unable to find it when I posted my first question.