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Anti-spammer suggestion
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Post by
Myrroddin
Wowhead has had issues, and continues to have issues, with a plethora of spammers. I'll assume that the staff perform due diligence when they are awake and in the office because the posts and threads get deleted in time. I will further assume that besides captcha there is a filter at work because I see a lot of "link removed" in the spam.
That's all well and good, but the issue persists. I have a solution, and while I do see a downside (there is
always
a downside to any solution), I see far more upsides.
Change the permission to post comments or forum threads to require at least one upload to Wowhead via the Client. Simple, done. Not only will that drastically reduce spam, it will also help gather information for the database, in which case everybody wins.
To whit, in order to gain permission to post for the first time, a user would then need:
A valid World of Warcraft account
A valid Wowhead account
The Wowhead Client and Wowhead_Looter AddOn (installed by the client)
Play the game for at least a few minutes
Upload to Wowhead via the Client
The downside is obvious: it means users who are not spammers would be forced to also upload data even if they are only here for the first time. But honestly, I believe users would rather go through the minor hoop jump of contributing to the database than have to wade through spam that might sit on the forum for several hours until staff arrive for the day.
Just a thought.
Post by
Erorus
I was involved with developing the most recent anti-spam solution for the Wowhead forums a year or two ago. I'm not aware if there were any changes made since then, but here's a few things we had in mind when I last looked at it:
While spam is certainly detrimental to an online community, we were very concerned about putting up roadblocks to legit users who wanted to contribute for the first time. We want new users to feel welcome and not overly burdened when making their first posts. So there's always a balance to strike between making it easy for new people to join, while making it hard for new spammers to get exposure. Having a community that's too hard for legit users to join might be worse than one that's easy for spammers to join. IIRC, there are throttles in place for even new legit users (e.g. there should be no reason for a legit user to make a dozen new threads in an hour).
Second, Wowhead has some automated systems in place that rely on users to report spam when they see it. I won't go into the specifics, lest it encourage people to abuse it. Basically, as long as legit users report spam, sufficiently-reported posts will automatically get removed from public view, and they will be reviewed by a moderator at a later time. IIRC, the reputation/age of both the poster and the reporters accounts are used to determine the threshold for whether a reported post gets removed automatically.
TL;DR: if you see spam, report it. Encourage other users to report spam when they see it. With enough reports (and it's not too many), spam is automatically removed from the forums without having to rely on staff to step in. When spam is repeatedly shot down, spammers move on to other forums.
I remember when we put this system in place, I'd look first thing in the morning and see dozens of posts removed within minutes of being posted, because other forum users had reported them as spam overnight. I'm not sure if there's a new wave of spam or people aren't reporting it anymore or what, but it worked pretty well back then.
Post by
Myrroddin
I have read your response, sat on it for almost three weeks, then read it again.
How about this: since there is no reason why any legitimate user needs to post links in the
subject line
of a thread, I think it is 99.99% safe to assume any post with a subject starting with "http" is spam. Thus far, going back years, I have yet to see a better "watermark" that screams that a given post is spam.
Of course, I have seen spam that does not have
http
in the subject or body of a post, but I'd wager good money that is a really good metric, at least for subject lines. Definitely not in the body of a post, naturally!
Post by
Nulgar
What about my rep from reporting them? :P
But nah, I had similar ideas to what Myrroddin suggests (don't think I ever truly voiced them, though) and some kind of auto-flagging based on keywords or similar would help a lot.
Post by
Myrroddin
What about my rep from reporting them? :PThat is the only good part about spam LOL.
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