// Why are there not some/more forum moderators here?
// Is it so hard to find a few trustworthy people to delete the spam?
// Whatever is currently being done is not enough.
I poked EllisLab on Twitter the other day about contacting someone regarding the forum (mainly for this specific reason), and have yet to receive a response. CodeIgniter is such a low priority to them, it seems. I’d like to see some acknowledgement.
I was looking through all the people in the two moderator groups, and there hasn’t been a post by one of them in over a year, and that was one person. Some haven’t even posted since 2008 or further back. I know that some spam in the Lounge section here was removed recently, so someone is trying. Would be nice to know who.
I’d also be willing to help moderate and keep this place clean, but if you can’t get their attention to ask for that in the first place, I dunno.
Between the spam and the tsunami of noobs, it’s not as fun as it used to be.
I’ve been a moderator on a forum before, and it can be a big job. It really needs to be done by a couple dozen people, and ideally they would be located in various time zones so that one is almost always logged in and ready to delete/ban. I’d be willing to help here, but it’s a shame that they haven’t done more. How hard could it be to recruit a few moderators? Well, I do think it’s hard, because since they don’t seem to participate in their own community, they don’t really know who is who.
i seen some of it tonight, and was wondering can’t they just put something like if eg:10 diff users report a post as a spam pull it out of the forum and suspend the poster till an admin get to it or something…..
What they need is to designate some moderators that actually visit this forum regularly…
That feature is a good idea, though, but it should be reduced to like 3-4 flags instead.
Seeing as how we never saw a response to this thread before, nor was I ever responded to on Twitter when I asked who I can contact about it, it clearly doesn’t mean squat to Ellis Lab :(
How about EllisLabs sets a flag limit then if the users flag spam say 5 times the user is flagged as deleted.
Or something on that line, this way we could handle it our selves.
But then there would have to be some kind of protection for abuse lol!
Like only users with a certain amount of post counts can flag them.
May be we should start a forum topic decussion on this…
Like a couple of weekends ago I had to flag over a 100 spam posts.
I’ve been hitting the forums quite hard over the last few days and I noticed it too.
What you’re describing is very similar to how Stack Overflow does it, however the flags auto delete posts, not users. If ~8 people flag a post as SPAM, there’s a very good chance that it’s spam. Time needs to be factored into the trigger as well, such as more than N spam flags within Y minutes (helps curtail ‘this question is just stupid let me flag it as SPAM to make it go away’)
You can then (optionally) suspend or destroy the account if a pattern of SPAM emerges.
As long as it’s clear that SPAM != poorly worded nearly incoherent post, it provides a good mechanism for the community to handle such things on their own.
The problem would be addressed just fine if EllisLab would actually pay attention. They haven’t even acknowledged this thread, so forum upgrades are a pretty far reach…
What I don’t get is the enticement for spam bots / people to post here. Usually spammers have an actual related item that they’re targeting. And yet we’re getting everything from fake purses to holistic food lists?!
At least the job board spammers were kind of close.
What gets me is why they keep coming back when they know tht they are flagged as spam and deleted the next day.
They are just after planting links, not really enticing you to click on them. We get a high volume of this on Stack Overflow. The people writing these bots (or hiring a bunch of people to register and copy / paste SPAM) realize that millions of programmers aren’t interested in fake gucci bags and shoes. They just want to try to get a forward link. Ironically, most places put nofollow tags around links that users submit to begin with.
When a spammer goes ‘serial’, we just add the domain they’re linking to a blacklisted user input list. Once done, any post containing a link to ‘*.fakegucci.info’ is simply rejected. If you just take a close look at headers before a request even hits your site, 2/3 of that crap never results in a view loading to begin with.
I’ve seen it happen before, and not sure if it would happen here, but at some point the real users of a forum just can’t take it anymore, and they lose interest and leave. Then the only people posting are spammers, the spam doesn’t get flagged because there are no real users, new people who may be interested in the forum immediately leave once they realize there are no real posts, and the forum basically dies.
I don’t think this forum is near that point, but between the current level of spam, and the quantity of English speaking forum members that actually qualify to be called “developers”, if I didn’t use CI every day, I don’t think I’d stick around. I do hope something good happens here.
