Feature Request: Anti-Necropost, Anti-Spam (TL;DR Warning)

@medz
But, what if someone spams the spam badge?

@jbartus That could solve part of the problem. I’m not certain that the spam posters are bots, many of them seem to be non-native English speakers but some seem to definitely be people. I’m not certain this is the proper application of recaptcha. A recaptcha doesn’t necessarily inform the user “hey, this is an old thread”.

I also think my ideas start slightly down the path to a reputation-based system for posters. Not necessarily saying one poster is more trusted than another, but that a poster has the ability to prove themselves. A post by a user who contributes every day could appear semantically the same as a spam post by a zero post user, but those of us who are around here know the difference. I think most of us can also spot the generic nonposts of someone who seems to be trying to build a few posts before they dump their spam on us. So if the system can even get a basic line on whether a user is “proven” or not the recaptcha isn’t necessary for the proven user and doesn’t necessarily have the same UX effect as a question or alert about thread age.

Further efforts could also then refine the status of “proven” user while leaving the logic the same–a two-class system where proven users can do things unproven users can’t, while the system just gets better at determining who is a proven user as we move along.

@jbartus

is relatively fool proof, possibly even @f00l proof!

Fie!

@djslack any automated system that tries to qualitatively determine a user’s eligibility based on the criteria I remember you defining last night (too busy to re-read right now) is going to be prone to the use of compromised accounts to get around. I don’t mind the idea of a “hey are you sure” prompt when posting in an inactive thread, I think it’s a decent idea really, but I think a ReCaptcha gate would solve the rest of it well enough. It’s not like we even have a bad problem here with spamming. Even if you were to be correct that there are human beings at the controls, adding a post count requirement would simply cause them to spread their filth across 10 newer threads or make decoy posts before posting their keyword-filled shameless plug in their original target. The way it stands now, someone makes a shameless plug that doesn’t fit, we tag TC, we move on, life goes on.

@f00l I just know you use your phone most of the time.

@jbartus Maybe the answer for spam is just that, it’s tc’s job and nothing needs to be done about that from the system’s perspective. At least until the levels increase that it can’t be dealt with that way. Maybe they never reach that level.

@djslack I have found in my development work that adding a ReCaptcha gate to things is pretty darned effective at keeping the bots out. Humans you can’t do a whole lot with except clean up after them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@jbartus there don’t appear to be a lot of spam bots here because it’s a one-off forum. It’s not like WordPress where a bot can spam thousands of sites automatically. This is why spam levels are not intolerable here, even with low barriers to entry and a remarkably open system… No one has bothered to write a spam bot for it yet because it’s only good here.

@djslack I don’t contest your premise though I’m not sure the evidence is necessarily present to support it. Even accepting the premise that spam bots are specifically programmed for specific systems and fall apart when they encounter a bespoke system like this one, I just don’t see that spammers are a big enough issue over here to make a huge fuss over.

I like the idea of the necro-prompt, it’s a good idea I’d like to see implemented on many forum systems now that you’ve brought it up and it should be comparatively easy to code. I just don’t see any of this as a means to block a sufficiently motivated human spammer and a Recaptcha prompt for new posters should take care of the automated ones.

@lifftchi Opinion here, but I see them differently. I arrive at stackoverflow almost exclusively via a Google search which takes me directly to a thread, while I usually arrive at threads here because they are at the top of the list. Part of it is that it’s a technical forum versus a social one. Also, updating, say, code examples for evolving syntax is useful, while adding “me too” posts on a two year old thread because someone thought we should help Google find a link to a blog reviewing the best wet wipes available in bulk doesn’t hold the same weight.

But the ability to ensure you can resurrect a thread allows just that. Asking “are you sure you want to resurrect this thread” versus locking it allows a user to think "did I have something new to add or did I not realize I was about to post ‘lol’ to a joke someone made in 2014? How long have I been scrolling down the main page, anyway?”

That said, it may be the community’s consensus that this is not really that big of a deal and I am in the minority. So thank you for sharing how you see this differently; I mean that.

@lifftchi This is all probably my fault. A spammer reopened a thread posted by one of our beloved members that died not long after she posted. I bitched about seeing her stuff again. Usually I don’t care that much.

@sammydog01 Not your fault. That did weigh on me a little but it seems this week there have been quite a few posts dragged up from way back. Next week there may be none, who knows.

@Dweezle TIL I’ve been using that word incorrectly.

@Ignorant

/Ignorant

@Ignorant I hope what you are trying to suggest here is that a couple of ‘/spam’ replies to a shitpost would delete it. Is that correct? Because that seems like a logical way for the community to police the community.

@simssj Interesting. I could at least see it as a shortcut for tattle, and that could conceivably be implemented in Mehdown.

For actual automatic deletion though I’d be concerned about the potential to be used against unpopular content.

Maybe /spam could remove links in the post being replied to while leaving the rest of the post. Potentially, having enough posts /spam’d could remove a poster’s right to post unfiltered.

@djslack Yeah, I think removing the links is a good first start.
From there, if enough other fora members with “trustworthy reputations” (whatever that means; maybe VMPs, or "K"s, or posts > 25, or…?) flag an offending post with /spam (then the post could conceivably be removed or redacted.

Think about it this way: a few replies of ‘/spam’ could significantly declutter the forums of a lot of Patriots / Tom Brady stuff. So there’s clearly an upside!

@simssj That thread is just two guys talking to each other so it’s not really a problem.

@Ignorant

@Ignorant

/Ignorant

f00l said 11 hours ago

That was an attempt at a joke.

Guess it went SPLAT!

Apologies for joke failure and sense of humor deficiency.

/giphy fail

@simssj @djslack ignoring the Tom Brady jabs for the sake of being serious here, I am unilaterally opposed to any sort of self-moderation tool like this. Sure, add a meh-down command /spam that flags the post to a moderation queue or something but still requires direct human intervention from a comparatively unbiased source. This kind of tool could very easily be abused to censor unpopular opinions and create yet another echo chamber on the internet, there are plenty of those already. Spamming is an extremely minor issue here on the Meh forums, this would be a step way too far to resolve such a minor concern.

@jbartus I think you said that better than I could, but that’s absolutely been a concern of mine I tried to voice from the OP onward.

I do feel like stripping only links without altering the rest of the post could allow this to be automated without much risk, but I absolutely don’t want the majority to be able to remove the minority’s content without intervention.

@djslack no. Just no. Even stripping the links is a step too far. You’re still censoring what the user had to say by stripping the links. Plus, it wouldn’t help eliminate the necroposting, it’s a non-solution looking to become a problem.

@jbartus If not stripping the text, perhaps at least stripping it as a hot link and flagging it?

@narfcake I am unilaterally opposed to any automated stripping. Even if the content is removed for 10 minutes before being reviewed and overturned, if it’s a legitimate post that 10 minutes of concealment can be the difference between reaching the target audience and not. I get that the intent here is a good one, but you know what they say about the road to hell.

@jbartus It’s not a full on removal, though; just that a URL is not automatically hot linked.

Say I was a spammer and posted … oh, catshirts.woot.com. It’s automatically turned into a hotlink. If someone else follows up with /spam, then text remains, but the URL is no longer readily clickable and a moderator is notified.

@narfcake so what you are suggesting is that the link would be provided in plain text form? I am less opposed to that but don’t much see the point, it also would stumble in instances where the URL syntax is used to link specific text in a post.

This all still strikes me as a solution in search of a problem.

@jbartus eliminating the ability to spam and retain results will eventually eliminate the majority of worthless necroposting, although you’re correct that that thread will still have been necroposted if the comment still exists.

I don’t view that as censorship at all. It’s only different in order of operation from not letting an unproven user post links to begin with, but that is not possible if we eliminate the possibility of the system rating about trustworthiness because that can be gamed as you mentioned above. But I can see where you’re coming from and that you have a valid point, and we can agree to disagree.

In my mind the prize for the spammer is a link from a site that is already highly ranked for whatever keyword they searched with the keyword of their choice as the text. It’s not the whopping dozens of clicks they would actually get from having their link in a thread here. My aim is to prevent them from getting that prize without having to bother TC to do it, if possible. If they can’t get that prize here, they will go do it somewhere else, and if we can accomplish that while keeping this community 100% open for legitimate contributing members, then we have improved the situation.

@narfcake’s idea is very useful in this context. Keep the URL, keep the text, just don’t link it, and it doesn’t help the spammer gain any benefit as far as a higher link reputation with Google by doing it here. My initial idea in the OP about masking the links from search crawlers would accomplish the same thing invisibly, but i don’t know if that’s feasible.

@jbartus I’ve added to my last post, but yes. Someone reading that post would now have to deliberately cut/paste that URL now, which greatly reduced the effectiveness of the post (to drive traffic/sales somewhere else.)

From cleaning follow-ups on spam posts, yes, people do click.

@narfcake @djslack I’m pretty sure most search engine crawlers would parse the link anyhow, so it would still push their ranking up on search engines. I still see this is a solution looking for a problem. We get a handful of spam posts a week, if that.

Specifically to @djslack, while I get what you are saying and your intent is good the room for abuse is the part I find unacceptable. If Mediocre decides a post has no place being on their site that’s their right as the owner of the venue but leaving that choice in the hands of random individuals on the internet is the part I have a problem with. The intent is good, in a perfect world the execution would be fine (though in a perfect world we’d never even have the issue in the first place…) but we don’t live in such a world.

@jbartus and once again… solution in search of a problem.

@djslack On shirt.woot, such would be “Adder-ized”.

@f00l I don’t know that it has the clearest connotation for the user, and if you land on a page through search or from an external link, the title may not be colored on the page itself or that may not be noticed.

You’d have to be in the know to understand what a brown topic meant.

On the other hand, then we could call someone who repeatedly does it a brownposter, which just feels like a fun name.

“Stop brownposting, Lazarus! You brownposter!”

Yep, it’s fun.

(TIL the user Lazarus joined us almost 1200 days ago, although they didn’t stick around. I didn’t want to tag them for real.)

@djslack

It would help the rest if us who care to not necropost accidentally.

Or make it obvious which topic that just got abused, so that someone could ping the CS drones to come hover over the offending post and destroy it with some new cyber weapon (like del)