187
votes
Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?
Maybe SE simply shouldn't publicly show profiles for users that have no interaction at all on the site. Users that have never voted, posted or done anything at all are just noise in the user listings ...
- 190k
126
votes
A machine can flag spam automatically. Can it do better?
I see a very big difference between moving to 4 or to 5 automatic flags. I wouldn't have any issue with 4 flags, but 5 flags means that only a single user is required to nuke the post. This would ...
- 190k
114
votes
Can a machine be taught to flag spam automatically?
Stack Exchange has its own spam detection and prevention system. If I understand its design goal correctly it prevents spam from even being posted. What SmokeDetector finds are basically the posts ...
reneMod
- 92.1k
102
votes
Accepted
More than 15k bottles of Viagra from Kenya, asking 110+ people for money, seriously?
That's on me, and I'm really sorry about this! As Glorfindel explained, I accidentally CC'd everyone entitled to a watch from this contest, instead of BCC'ing... :\ One of the recipients then sent ...
- 26.2k
101
votes
Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?
A further refinement to Ilmari Karonen's answer (which refines Mad Scientist's): make profiles of new accounts that haven't done anything visible only to logged-in users.
This does a few things:
...
- 184k
76
votes
A machine can flag spam automatically. Can it do better?
The biggest advantage I see in how the Smoke Detector project has operated thus far is its transparency: one of the most frustrating aspects of using these sites is how difficult it can be to ...
- 454k
73
votes
How can we handle spam faster?
Tl;dr a decent portion of the community of spam fighters went on strike.
Expanded answer
We have extremely good community spam protection. Or, we used to. Normally, there’s a number of tools used to ...
- 16.3k
72
votes
Can a machine be taught to flag spam automatically?
We determined we can beat those numbers and eliminate spam from Stack Overflow and the rest of the network even faster.
(Emphasis mine)
What, if any, work have you done to ensure the robustness of ...
- 16.9k
72
votes
Accepted
Does the Charcoal team plan to run SmokeDetector again?
Unlike Makoto or others who have commented here, I am a member of Charcoal, and though I'm not an admin in the Charcoal org, I run the bulk of the infrastructure that is necessary for SmokeDetector to ...
- 2,019
70
votes
A machine can flag spam automatically. Can it do better?
The thing that concerns me about 5 auto-flags is that sometimes users are wrong and now it only takes one user to spam-delete a post. A statistic that would help me better evaluate this is: on each ...
- 184k
61
votes
The rate limiting system for posts is on strike; can it please be made to work?
This is really not a new problem.
What has changed is that Smoke Detector/Charcoal is on strike together with many moderators.
Fix the core Stack Exchange problems -> end the strike -> turn ...
59
votes
More than 15k bottles of Viagra from Kenya, asking 110+ people for money, seriously?
It turns out a Stack Exchange employee accidentally sent an e-mail, related to this contest, without putting the 110+ recipients in the BCC as required by data protection regulations. Therefore, all ...
GlorfindelMod
- 256k
45
votes
How do we stop users from using the "spam" flag when there is no "promotion of a product or service"?
The moderator flag queue is biased towards bad spam flags.
Posts that are deleted by 6 spam flags from the community have their flags marked helpful. This removes the flags from the moderator queue. (...
- 36.3k
44
votes
Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?
As a subtle alternative to Mad Scientist's suggestion, we could simply add a noindex meta tag to the profile pages of users with less than some minimum amount (say, 5 or 10 points) of rep. This would ...
- 31.8k
42
votes
A machine can flag spam automatically. Can it do better?
Art mentioned this in a comment:
However, while some people are more zealous than others in flagging
I dunno whether bad luck, or good that it occurred, this happened yesterday:
The red color ...
- 10.8k
38
votes
What is the policy on destroying users with very spammy profiles but have not posted spam yet?
There isn't a clearly defined policy available because... we don't have one. We actually don't encourage moderators to seek out these kinds of users and destroy them because it's usually a waste of ...
- 190k
38
votes
Why can't we blacklist questions with a description containing a mobile number and the string "loans"?
The SE spam filter is notoriously broken and has been like this for a long time.
Usually the difference is caught by the Charcoal project, but hostility from SE has caused the project to go on strike ...
- 6,838
37
votes
-100 rep penalty effectiveness for spam?
It's worth remembering there's two (and half) types of spammers.
There's the big commercial operations - your garden variety rx spam (probably automated) and manual (mostly software). These are beyond ...
- 193k
37
votes
Accepted
Where did the "Spam" and "Rude" flags go?
Adding this as an answer for visibility: thanks for bringing this to my attention- just pushed out a fix. I had added flagging to election nominations and accidentally included a bad check. This ...
- 1,521
35
votes
Accepted
How to deal with an otherwise salvageable post with a spam link?
If, at first glance, the the post looks good but has an apparent spam link at the end there's a good chance that it is really spam.
The legitimate content will have been plagiarised from somewhere (...
ChrisFMod
- 101k
35
votes
A machine can flag spam automatically. Can it do better?
Smoke detector is a fantastic project, it has inspired many of us to do other type of moderation bots.
However once Brad Larson stated in this comment on a question that I made
I'm not terribly ...
- 867
33
votes
Can we do more to stop bots from posting?
They are not bots; they are humans who get paid a miserable salary in exchange for posting spam. They're smart enough to solve the captchas Stack Exchange already throws at them and some even use ...
GlorfindelMod
- 256k
29
votes
Accepted
Blatantly off topic spam that discloses affiliation
Just flag it.
If it’s off topic and spam, it needs to go away, even with full disclosure. Disclosure is necessary but not sufficient.
- 193k
28
votes
Don't age away spam/rude/abusive flags
Before making any changes, I did a bit of looking in the database to see how often these flags age away. While it doesn't happen very often, it is enough on some of the smaller sites that we don't ...
- 51.6k
28
votes
Spam Profiles are getting my goat. Could we have better tools for mods to deal with profile spam?
These profiles are starting to spill into other sites as well.
Yesterday after this meta post was made, I hopped into the user search for RPG Stack Exchange, which I moderate, and looked for profiles ...
- 34.1k
28
votes
A machine can flag spam automatically. Can it do better?
I feel that the increased automated flags should be opt-in with the agreement of the moderation team, and community involved. At a broader level, I think the individual communities ought to have a say ...
- 193k
27
votes
Is it okay to flag blatant spam using two accounts?
No.
This is effectively giving yourself twice as many votes toward the post's deletion. It would be similarly against the rules to cast two close votes, two delete votes, etc.
You can, however, ask ...
- 28.7k
26
votes
Accepted
Remove the 2 link limit for new users everywhere
This is a reasonable request. We don't want to be blocking new users from posting, but we also don't want to start letting in more junk. While SmokeDetector is great as identifying spam, we still ...
- 51.6k
26
votes
Accepted
Why shouldn't I upvote spam?
No. You're giving spammers reputation, which they can use to do nasty things like posting comments with spam links (which tend to go unnoticed on old posts), post more spam links, posting spam on meta ...
GlorfindelMod
- 256k
26
votes
Is it acceptable for a moderator to advertise their own products or services in their profile?
You can pretty much have anything you want on your profile (of course, taking into spirit and letter of the COC and other policies of the network), and as far as I know, there's nothing that tells us ...
- 193k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible