A note and request to Staff
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The number of spam posts hitting the forums in the last 3-6 hours all dealing with the same topic is both infuriating and distracting. While I and other forum volunteers can continue to mark these posts for your attention and deletion, I feel it’s more beneficial to everyone that volunteers’ time is spent answering community member questions instead.
From past experience you’ve shown us that it is entirely possible to manage/suppress display of certain posts or certain users. Please find a way to bozo these spam posts so that we forum volunteers don’t have to spend any more time on them than absolutely necessary.
(“Spending time on them” has been my choice, of course.)
Thanks for listening.
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While I and other forum volunteers can continue to mark these posts for your attention and deletion, I feel it’s more beneficial to everyone that volunteers’ time is spent answering community member questions instead.
@justjennifer
Hi there,
I’m on the no stress plan lately and that means I ignore the spam threads you refer to. There are so many that e so obviously spam that I don’t even click into them. If we Volunteers don’t tag them with modlook they simply fall of the front page into the oblivion of unanswered and untagged threads.re: duplicates
I no longer tag any threads with “duplicate” and “close thread please” either. I simply tag the thread with modlook so our Moderator or Staff don’t have two tags to remove. -
yes please
Since WordPress never sleeps, should be easy for an intern to write a script that scans on spam & spammer (two most common tags) and put a popup on the screen of a couple of people who can zap the offenders – the people would not even need to be “forum rated” – just able to delete and kill spam accounts
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P.S. I hasten to add if Staff can provide some way to nuke the spam threads I’d love to have a button that provided the satisfaction of clicking it. Any means of nuking them would be welcomed.
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Hi tt, I’d be happy to ignore the spam threads, but when they cover nearly the entire front page of the forums they make it incredibly difficult (for me, anyway) to find the legitimate threads that need attending to. The period I mentioned today was particularly exasperating. At some point I, too, will probably become more zen about just letting these posts slide, and walk away to find something more productive to do with my time until they are dealt with.
@auxclass – I have no doubt that the appropriate tag’s RSS feed is on someone’s radar, but don’t think it should require forum volunteers manually tagging 5+ threads in a row to get their attention. I think there are ways of auto-tagging such posts (just look at the lot we’ve had in here today and their content) just as the Supportbot recognizes potential ORG user posts and replies to them. So yes, a script to nuke/bozo them automattically.
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If you run into something like this again, we’d be happy to do the clean up rather than have you all modlook every thread. I check my email pretty regularly so you’re welcome to contact me directly.
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Hi jackiedana, thanks for the offer and I will certainly do so if I happen to be in the forums when it occurs.
At the same time, under normal circumstances Staff/volunteers aren’t always around in spite of WordPress.com never sleeping and I wonder how everyone’s life can be made a little easier. I think auxclass’ idea of a script along with possible auto-tagging/bozoing/nuking is a good start. I hope Staff will consider it.
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A filter could be set to require a certain number such as 3 to be triggered so it would not annoy whoever had the short forum watch straw
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To all,
There is lots of spam that does not get through because of Akismet. I zap the spam when I’m looking at the forums, but I’m online at other times, so feel free to email me directly as well.
As for removing tags, they get zapped with the moderator spam action, so adding “spammer” tag is really useful for me: I can simply look at the “spammer” tag and see there is a problem. With the general “modlook” tag, I have to open each thread to see if a spammer has added a post to that thread.
Please don’t answer the spammers in anyway, however, because the OP’s link moves down to the person making an amusing crack, then I have to delete that comment as well = more work for me…
And one other thing: if someone is spamming the forum (especially those stupid sport tv streaming offers), then go to the site linked to their names and report their blogs as spam blog.
Also, keep in mind that if a spammer is adding a post every few minutes, then the spammer action won’t take effect immediately. Usually when that happens I keep a watch on the forum and continue marking it. If that doesn’t stop the spamming, then I mark the account as a bozo. I did ask once, but perhaps Jackie can clarify: if I mark a spammer, and a bozo both, does that cancel out the effectiveness of the spam action?
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FYI if you click on the “Support threads that are more than 2 hours old” link at the bottom of the page, you avoid at least THIS spammer.
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Thanks Tess.
We do have a spam filter for the forums, but stuff still gets past it, just like a small percent of spam blogs and comments get past our automated systems as well. As much as we’d like our secret army of robots to smash all of the spam, sometimes human intervention is still required. If a moderator or staff member doesn’t catch it, just let us know.
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And one other thing: if someone is spamming the forum (especially those stupid sport tv streaming offers), then go to the site linked to their names and report their blogs as spam blog.
I report them but I do not tag them with “modlook” or with “spammer” any more. When there is a spam string by the same username account I report the first one and ignore all the rest.
I avoid going near my overflowing email accounts when I am on the support forums answering questions so I won’t be emailing jackiedana or you.
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Marking a thread’s OP as spam also deletes it (if there are no other posts) so that’s why doing both is a good idea.
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Good morning from this end of the world.
Thanks for all the additional information, but I still wonder why at least part of this action cannot be automated saving everyone a lot of hassle and headache. Adding yet another step of emailing (or tweeting) someone is a step in the opposite direction.
As 1tess mentioned, there are other keywords besides the obvious one that repeat themselves especially towards the weekends, that it would seem logical to add them to a list of some sort and auto-hide or bozo them for review.
Another interesting thing that came up while reporting these people is that some accounts were opened months ago and posting on their blogs the same type of content as they eventually started posted in the forums. So there should probably be some tweaking of the filters on that end as well.
There are certainly fewer concerned forum volunteers than there are people trying to promote their employers’ wares in the forums so additional means are needed to deal with it.
As I said, for your consideration.
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Hi justjennifer,
We are doing everything we can to prevent spam from appearing anywhere in the WordPress.com universe. Despite the spam that does get through, you would be astounded to see just how much spam doesn’t.
My comment about contacting me or other Happiness Engineers wasn’t meant to add more work for anyone. I just wanted to note that I’m happy to hear from volunteers when you’re frustrated or when there’s an issue, and do what I can to help.
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I still see the sex toy spam in the forum – yes I am sure that a lot of spam is blocked, all I need to do is look at the Akismet stats to see that
thanks
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