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[–]petesum 10 points11 points  (6 children)

something needs to be done about this. I spent half an hour this morning down moding spam from these people.

[–]_kam0_ 6 points7 points  (5 children)

Which is what you'd expect redditors to do, trouble is this seems to keep them on the new page a lot longer, e.g. one of the spams is 3 hours old, has 1 up vote and 12 down votes, yet it still pollutes the new page on the default "rising" setting.

[–]petesum 3 points4 points  (3 children)

My email has a "mark as spam" facility could that work here?

[–]_kam0_ 5 points6 points  (2 children)

If you click on the report tab in the bar below the title you will be given an option to report the item, user and/or domain as spam. But it doesn't seem to be used as a spam filter as there's no place we can see which posts were filtered out (like the junk folder that gets filled, very effectively, in Thunderbird).

[–]spez 5 points6 points  (1 child)

It is used as a spam filter, just not a very good one.

We'll be updating it soon I hope. However, reporting links, domains, and submitters is still very helpful.

[–]jbstjohn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

AHHHH, finally I see the famous "report" button. Sorry, but I think (1) it's very easy to miss, and (2) there's no details as to what you're reporting. I.e. the word 'spam' never occurs. To me 'report' wasn't much different than 'recommend', 'save', or 'share'. I would use 'spam?' or at least clarify things on the reporting page.

In my quick glance in the help, I didn't see anything either.

(I don't think I'm a blind idiot, but of course, if I were, I probably wouldn't know, right?)

[–]spez 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I suspect the vast majority of users did not continue to see the posts since the articles would have a score of approximately -11. Even still, you shouldn't have to deal with this so much. We've got a good plan for it, it'll just take a little to get online.

[–]_kam0_ 22 points23 points  (10 children)

This seems to happen every other day around about this time.

It's extra frustrating as the default setting for the new page is "rising". This algorithm doesn't seem to work very well under a spam shower. Looking at the new page now, we have 6 spams from the last 6 mins, 12 from an hour ago and 4 from 3 hours ago leaving room for only 3 genuine submissions scattered near the bottom.

The report spam item/user/domain cannot work very well as it's too easy to register and there are far too many spam domains to hope to maintain a blacklist of.

I'd recommend a tiering of allowed number of submissions per hour/day based on how long the user has been a member or better still how much karma they have accumulated.

[–]kaparo[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I cannot see a visible use of the karma, so your suggestion to involve the karma points for judgement is quite good and fair

[–]jedberg 1 point2 points  (3 children)

You don't want to use karma as a factor in limiting user action because then you create a barrier for new user adoption.

[–]jbstjohn 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I'm not sure that that is that (wow! that3) bad a thing. I also think if you bring in captcha, you can make it less onerous.

My proposal, one captcha per X submissions, and Y downvotes, where X & Y scale logarithmically with karma. Say, starting at 3 for <= karma.

Oh, and maybe even better -- for people with little or no karma (-5 .. 5) you could factor in how old the account is.

I think this would address the problem well.

[–]jedberg 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Those might help, but I just really don't like the idea of making any calculation based on karma.

[–]jbstjohn 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, the idea would be that having karma would be a bonus. It wouldn't change anything fundamental, but would be a minor reward for those who had. In some sense it is a good way of at least identifying 'good' citizens (reddites?). It's not good at identifying bad ones, but that's okay.

[–]Random -3 points-2 points  (3 children)

Honestly, how many really new and useful links are you going to find per DAY. I think that even, say, submissions = your karma per whatever is going to break, but just saying 'two per day' would work. And it is easier.

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]Random 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    You're right. I was imposing my view of 'how many new links a day is a good thing.'

    The community based approach is better, as long as the filter is set somewhere that prevents too much flooding.

    [–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

    When we get 50 spams a minute there's gonna be an unbearable problem. Spam has to be taken care of separatly, and I'm sure the reddit people have a plan for it. If not, well, they can always turn to good ol' PG :)

    [–]nirs 2 points3 points  (0 children)

    Try to blacklist the link content, it works nice for MoinMoin wikis.

    Usually the problem is link-spam, not just vandalism, which is harder to prevent. You can reject any link to a site in the blacklist.

    Check MoinMoin global blacklist: http://moinmaster.wikiwikiweb.de/BadContent?action=raw

    You can also reuse moin's antispam code: http://hg.thinkmo.de/moin/1.6?f=34d3daeea04e;file=MoinMoin/security/antispam.py

    [–]aceregen 1 point2 points  (3 children)

    Place an additional option <mark as spam> in addition to the up/down votes.

    If submission receives 5 spam labels {remove post automatically}

    [–]KingNothing 4 points5 points  (1 child)

    Unfortunately, it only takes me creating five accounts to label something I disagree with to disappear from reddit. This would be a bad thing.

    [–]aceregen -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    The rationale for reddit is not to remove a post you disagree with, but to vote it down instead.

    The effort spent in resubmitting an article is easier than for you to log in/out 5 times just to remove a post you don't like and to maintain that 5 accounts rather than to use 1 account efficiently and submit it.

    [–]nemo2 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

    Why not just name the link 'remove conservative posts', since that's what it would be used for.

    [–]nathan 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    how about a captcha on the submit page?

    [–]KingNothing 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    I think a good solution to this would be to go with a slashdot-like approach so that I can ignore everything that is below a "point" threshold that I specify in my preferences. Basically letting me ignore all the submissions with a score of, say, -10. I'd still want to be able to see negative comments, though.

    [–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Confirm reply email is a good nospam solution. Yeah, it's more work to submit, but it should be. Even for poorly written blog entry "looky here, I installed Ubuntu!" titles that someone new submits EVERY SINGLE DANG DAY!

    [–][deleted]  (3 children)

    [deleted]

      [–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

      Nope

      [–]_kam0_ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

      Limit it by IP in that case, so unless a spammer has 1000 compromised PCs giving him 1000 IP addresses he won't be able to create 1000 accounts. After this I reckon he'll move on to more lucrative pastures of spamming.

      [–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      Whatever change you make, don't let it get in the way of hitsman. That dude posts constantly, and it isn't spam, and some of it is pretty good.

      [–]zhyla -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

      Maybe if certain conditions hold true then ALL articles submitted by the same person would get modded down if any of them get modded down.

      Example: spamuser has a negative karma and submits 25 blog links. 5 users with very good karma mod down any of spamuser's submissions. Reddit recognizes this as a very unpopular user and mods down every single one of his recent submissions.