Why doesn't Fluther have a spam bot?
Asked by
syz (
35938
)
October 21st, 2014
It seems like a lot of the spam load could be handled by a bot (I say this knowing noting about programming), especially those that that have a link in the body of the question.
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8 Answers
The last few today have gotten very subtle. It’s only by looking at the profile that gives a few clues, but there’s nothing there to ID them until they start with the questions. The previous one’s were obvious.
Oh, I’m not saying it would eliminate the need for the mods to catch spam, but it could help.
I agree with you. It would weed out the rookies and the dumb ones.
Because that’s what I’m for!
More seriously, though, determining whether or not something counts as spam is not easily automated. We can usually tell by looking at it, but bots don’t have all the context we have. Not every question, answer, or profile containing a link is spam. Not even every question, answer, or profile from a new user containing a link is spam.
Fluther currently has a few methods of auto-spam-blocking, but most of it is manually done.
There are some spammers who post as many spam answers as possible. To prevent this, there is a limit as to how many answers a user can post in a certain amount of time.
There are services, like Project Honeypot, which provide the spam history of IP addresses, which can help a mod pre-emptively ban a spammer.
If we ever get attacked by a spammer who creates many accounts to post the same question over and over again, there is a way to auto-block a specific question title. As far as I know, this feature has only been used once.
A lot of spammers, recently, have adopted the following strategy:
1) They create dozens of accounts over the period of a few days, each in the format of FirstLastNumber, like johnsmith254.
2) Each account is on a separate IP address, each with a clean spam history.
3) The email addresses contain their name (johnsmith@example.com) and are always verified.
4) They filled in their profile description, but with vague phrases. A typical example is “freelance photographer, artist, web designer, student”.
In this situation, there’s not much to be done, since each individual account looks clean and the only connection is that “their usernames look similar.”
@PhiNotPi Shhhh. Don’t give away all your secrets. We trust your judgement.
I’m just a spambot and I know my place…..............
An option could be that the question is not put up until it’s seen by a mod. It’s held in limbo like it is when a question is sent back for editing.
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