Sciencemadness Discussion Board

'Automatic' crowd-sourced spam filtering

Reboot - 4-2-2018 at 08:26

It occurs to me that one way to deal with off-topic or spam posts might be to crowd-source the process.

I'm imagining a simple 'flag' option that any user can access. Let registered users vote on new posts, and if a certain threshold is reached (say, two or three flags) it gets automatically moved to Detritus, where it could be manually reviewed by mods if desired.

For execution, you would need variables to hold the vote count and the list of people who flagged it (so they couldn't double-vote and abuse could be tracked.)

If you REALLY wanted to get clever you could automatically re-weight people's spam votes based on whether mods agree with the flagging later on (so if somebody keeps voting against the consensus their vote would count for less and less over time.)

To prevent unpredictable long-term problems I would have the mechanism age out (so only recent posts could be automatically moved.)

It would take a little trouble to program, but might relieve one of the pain points of running a forum while giving a very fast response to 'bad' posts (since the first few users who saw it could remove it.)

aga - 4-2-2018 at 08:36

It's a great idea for an un-moderated board.

The mods here do a really good job at keeping the crap down, so it'd be very hard to imagine that us users could do it any better.

The current mods seems to have impartiality off to a fine art, whereas some users may not be so unbiased towards others.

j_sum1 - 4-2-2018 at 13:50

Spam posts seem to be pretty much under control.
Kooks and kewels don't last long. It always impresses me how fast the drug spoonfeeding posts get thrown down the toilet.
Then there is our resident troll-spammer. (Perjorative comment deleted. I'm not feeding the fire.) That is mostly contained at the moment.

IOW, great idea but not fixing a problem that actually exists at present.

Crowfjord - 5-2-2018 at 17:58

Reboot, what you suggest is pretty close to how the current system works:
Quote: Originally posted by Polverone  
I have tweaked the reporting process, somewhat inspired by violet sin. Before spam had to be reported by two trusted members or one moderator before it was auto-deleted. Now it will be auto-deleted if it is reported by one trusted member and one 'semi-trusted' member. Everyone who has been registered at least 60 days and has at least 50 posts automatically becomes a member of the 'semi-trusted' group. This should reduce the waiting time for spam deletion, and means that any frequent user of the site can help stamp out spam.

Oh, and elementcollector1, this has been pointed out before, but: the spammers are human. Captchas do not work because these are not bots. IP banning doesn't work because they use different IP addresses. The only solution that stops the spammers and does not discourage genuine prospective members is to be vigilant about deleting spam when it appears.


Just report the spam, others will as well, and the spam is gone in a few minutes. There are more details in the sticky spam thread.

[Edited on 6-2-2018 by Crowfjord]

Corrosive Joeseph - 5-2-2018 at 18:25

I had been reporting spam for ages (click report, type in spam and submit.....)

Then one day I looked in my Outbox and all my reports were marked 'unread' so then I was unsure if my reporting was effective.

I am on here most waking hours, even when not reading here SM is usually open in a window somewhere.

Should I keep reporting........?


/CJ

Crowfjord - 5-2-2018 at 18:57

Yeah, the program is automatic. I'm pretty sure that the message doesn't need to be read for the system to work.

Corrosive Joeseph - 5-2-2018 at 19:02

Quote: Originally posted by Crowfjord  
Yeah, the program is automatic. I'm pretty sure that the message doesn't need to be read for the system to work.


Cool........ Thanks for reply.......... I will report as they appear

Over and out


/CJ

NEMO-Chemistry - 5-2-2018 at 19:17

OOOpps
I assumed the report was read also! Shit, i write all kinds of funny junk lol. Ok from now on I will just put spam.

Actually I think this was good bringing it up. Some people like me were not around back then. So we didnt know, now we do the spam should go faster.

And I bet some others are thinking exactly what I am thinking ;). easy cure for another small problem is it not :D.

Bert - 5-2-2018 at 19:27

Yup. Just hit the report button, type "spam", hit send.

This sends notices to ALL the mods, including the MIAs who have not signed in for years. The first mod who sees it, it is gone.Those already dealt with reports are often never read by other mods, Quicksilver in particular is missing for some years, but every spam report I make lodges a (never read) outgoing message in my out box until I clear them mannualy.

We have some bugs. Maybe a few big hairy rats too.

Melgar - 7-2-2018 at 19:44

I swear to you, there is a VERY EASY solution to the spam problem. I could solve it, but would need direct access to the server. Only Polverone has that. And he doesn't show up here very often.

I used to moderate a bulletin board, and cut spam down by like 99% just by slightly modifying the user registration page to throw off bots. I could do it again. The offer is out there. It'd mean a lot less of a deluge of private messages to the mods, and maybe they'd get real messages more often.

[Edited on 2/8/18 by Melgar]