How you can help with the recent spam attacks

submitted by magnora7[A] from self.SaidIt

Reporting spam is awesome and very much appreciated and helps a lot. But actually the most helpful thing you can do to combat spam is to upvote things that AREN'T spam. This will cause them to rise to the top and help the front page look less spammy. This is really the secret sauce.

Thanks to everyone helping in whatever way they can, I assume this spam issue is probably going to keep getting worse until the election is over. Election years are always insane with the botting and spamming on forums across the internet (which just shows how much of a paid operation it all is).

Anyway, thanks for visiting saidit. I appreciate that you are here, and sometimes we see stuff here that you don't see on other sites. So I think saidit still has a lot of value even with the spam and attackers. And the reason it has value is because of good people submitting good things and voting likewise, even 6 years on. So, thank you.

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[–]LarrySwinger2 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (9 children)

Hey m7. There is no downvote button on this website, so we cannot downvote spam, that's the disadvantage of it. In my opinion, you really need to counterbalance this by making all the established users content admins. (Check /s/defaultmods for a proposed list.) That way the website remains community moderated. On Reddit users have a downvote button, and on other websites there is an effective reporting mechanism. 4chan has lots of janitors that can only remove content while any user can report posts, and it's very effective despite the volume of posts they have. Please take inspiration from that.

[–]magnora7[S] 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

There is no downvote button on this website, so we cannot downvote spam, that's the disadvantage of it.

But more importantly, the attackers cannot downvote real content like they can on reddit. That's the strength of saidit's design, your upvote is always counted and can't be counter-balanced by bots with 100 accounts downvoting stuff to censor it. Your upvote means a lot more on saidit than it does on reddit because it can't be destroyed by bad actors here.

We've been appointing mods, and we can appoint more.

[–]x0x7 4 insightful - 2 fun4 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 2 fun -  (1 child)

What about making some mods across all subs, but they are under strict rules that they are only to remove spam, and not act as a general moderator of their extended subs.

The reason I bring it up is this. I'm a mod of many very obscure subs that people invited me to and I said why not. Then I was also invited to whatever. I managed to knock out one that was in whatever. But 90% of the spam content I'm not going to happen to be a moderator of. All in all I've only removed one thing in my entire time here, ever.

I'm happy to do more, but I'm never the moderator of whatever obscure sub they use.

[–]HibikiBlack 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The downvote is more of a disadvantage than a helping hand. But yeah, we do need more mods.

Thanks for all the effort Mag. I hope everything is good for you.

[–]RedditButt 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

making all the established users content admins

I don't think that would work. People are too much of babies to abuse it if they get into a slapfight over something stupid.

[–]LarrySwinger2 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

It won't go wrong if the mods of /s/defaultmods are made content admins. And we can always remove someone's powers if it goes wrong. That worked on /s/conspiracies.

[–]RedditButt 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

ok... I mean, nothing against trying it and seeing what happens, but that's just my prediction based on past human behavior.

[–]IMissPorn 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Maybe you need a third level of upvote then. I'm not gonna mark things insightful or funny just because they're not spam. That would defeat the purpose of having upvotes in the first place.

[–]Brewdabier 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I do my part and report any spam I see only problem is the dimwits usually have a 1-7 day old account,

[–]WoodyWoodPecker 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I spend a lot of time reporting spam. I only upvote when the post is interesting or funny. Some stuff I cannot upvote because it is shite.

[–]dissidentrhetoric 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Some possible ideas

-Adding a captcha every time you post at the site level rather than with cloud flare, that way you can read as much as you want without the captcha but only when posting you have to complete a sum from an image and do a captcha image. Look at darknet for inspiration on captchas.

-restrict sign up by approving each individual account, forcing people to add in additional comments when signing up that can be used to determine if the account is a real person or not. Could help to spot bulk account creation more easily, but requires more over ahead and could delay sign up times due to waiting approvals for weeks. Some users may fail to sign up. Trade off might be worth it.

-clean up the current user list, disabling all unused and suspected spam accounts. Then give all remaining users 5 invites. Then make the site invite only.

-At least until the site scales and has more resources and people to deal with the spam, you could disable search index robots.txt to reduce SEO spam.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

XD what we need is some people to make some invite only subs then invite only the reputable people so there is atleast 1 clean space. What a pain.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Good luck getting everyone to join a sub tho.

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

lol yea its not intended to be a legit solution. just me fucking around

[–]YoMamma 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Excellent point, to emphasize the importance of voting (and to refresh the page to see if the vote was recorded).

[–]neolib 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, it's important to remember that votes count only in the same 1-5 min window since the last Cloudflare check - I usually upvote, and then open the discussion in another tab to see whether the vote was recorded.

[–]asterias 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Those Cloudflare settings make Saidit really difficult to use and I see spam is actually increased over time. The central page is full of spam about those phone services and I wonder how they make it with those strict Cloudflare settings.

My point is that perhaps current Cloudflare settings make the site difficult to use for normal users but don't do much for spammers who appear to have no difficulty posting dozens of spam posts under so many different names.

[–]Jiminy 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah cloudflare keeps real users away and so now it's mostly shills. Cloudflare owns this site and they don't want this site to get bigger but they don't shut it down for now.

[–]magnora7[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

https://saidit.net/s/SaidIt/comments/cwen/holy_shit_what_with_all_the_spam_here_its_so_much/16408

[–]HugodeCrevellier 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Isn't there some moderator bot that can get rid of spam accounts almost as soon as they appear?

Some possible criteria:

A newish account, posts reported as spam more than x times, no comments, etc.

[–]NutterButterFlutter 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Automoderator can do all of that, yeah. It doesn't ban, but it can remove posts and comments for a mod to manually review.

The downside is it can also be used maliciously against real users and content. And if there's no one actively moderating a sub, then both spam and real content just sits in a queue waiting for someone to handle it.

[–]HugodeCrevellier 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I conscientiously report spam cause it makes me feel that I've contributed to improving the world, even if by just a tiny little bit. :)

[–]package 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

If you could make the report button double as a block button that'd be great. There's so much spam at once that it's easier lately to just block users instead of reporting individual posts.

[–]f946811700ae 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Whatever the solution, it needs to be feasible or to make the problem manageable. Otherwise, be careful less you see yourself reduced to wronging others to make the problem easy on your self. Examples are plenty elsewhere.

If I am not wrong, whatever the solution, it would need to follow a whitelisting approach rather than a blacklisting approach, or if not, it needs limits in place to reduce the possible maximum rate of spam to something manageable by the moderators making blacklisting feasible.

[–]m68k 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There's a shit load of spam everywhere. Even on Twitter, porn spam. Do a search on a search engine, spam results. The internet was a big mistake, and we can't go back.

I do wish you luck on handling the shitballs who run these spam bots. This would drive me nuts.

[–]NutterButterFlutter 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

How do you feel about spam that's not the obvious kind - foreign bots linking to nonsense or shady URLs - but the more subtle kind - spamming the same post across multiple subs en-masse?

I'm seeing the latter happen more and more, and admins have had different opinions on that. Some see it as spam, and some see it as "any engagement is good engagement". Thought I should ask you directly.

To me it's sort of like what happened the the Iron Left a few years back, where they spammed their own content to take over the front page and drown out legitimate users of other subs. It's a little different though, because it's just a couple users that just mass-post the same thing, regardless of the actual intent of the sub.

[–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Yeah I just banned a guy for posting everything 7 times, even after me asking, even though the content was legit-ish... I see it as another form of infiltration because they're just diluting actual content in their desire to take over the front page, basically. They're not working with the community in an organic way to try and develop conversation. I can see the difference and I act on it if it's bad enough and they don't respond to messages about it.

[–]NutterButterFlutter 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

OK thank you! I'll continue to report when I see things like that then, I had stopped for several months because I was getting mixed answers.

[–]magnora7[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thank you!

[–]m68k 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The main problem is, I could upvote, only if I can find a single post within all of this spam.

Perhaps a probation period on new users, which limits how much they can post... I'm really out of ideas... Good luck on handling these bots though, it gotta be insane.

[–]HugodeCrevellier 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

You need either better auto-admin bots or more human admins to zap spam accounts, daily.