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As we all have noticed (With we, I'm referring to those that's frequenting the spam and abuse forum as well as the moderation queue) the russian spambot is back.
And something needs to be done to get the work load and the response time down.
I don't have very much to say about the moderation queue, it works really well. It catches almost everything with very few false positives and is easy enough to work on.
If I should complain about anything, it's a bit slow loading, so if you could tune the priority a teensy bit I'd be happy.
Anyhow, hats off to Dennis and the rest of the crew for a good job. 
So what's the problem then?
Well, the moderation queue can actually be handled fairly easy as far as I'm concerned
The bottleneck is what happens afterwards. Cleaning up the offending accounts.
The procedure goes basically like this:
First check if they have been reported before or not.
If not, post about them in the spam forum.
Check posts from other members if other spammer accounts need to be removed.
Double check if it's a probable spammer or not. If there is no obvious reason for why not (as the proof is already gone), trust the poster.
Report.
If it's the tenth report, add a note to the OP that it's been removed so that other member knows they don't need to check this post.
I know that all this work was put into order to minimize mistakes, and I'm not simply suggesting a change in number of reports necessary as it doesn't really do anything about the underlying problem.
I believe we need a different approach to the problem.
This is how I see it: Someone is a spammer if they post spam. So the check on whether someone is a spammer or not, should be done when a message is reported or rejected from the moderation queue.
This should be automatic, we should not need to report the user as a spammer.
But there obviously needs to be some safety catches in the system. And actually, with the current system we simply trust the person that cleaned up the moderation queue, so that safety catch isn't there.
Anyway,
First we need some kind of throttling in the system. A lot of it is already in place, but bear with me.
- I don't like captchas and similar and I'm having some doubts on how efficient it would be, but your account is something you register only once if you're a normal user, and then it has to be considered OK.
- A user should be blocked from posting whenever they have more than a certain number of messages in the moderation queue.
Whenever the messages have been approved the account is unblocked.
However, any user that gets a message rejected should automatically get their account disabled.
There's an obvious drawback with this approach, if I click the wrong button, the user would get blocked and I wouldn't even know I did something wrong.
So we need at least two accepts or rejects on a message. This is twice as much work in the moderation queue, but it is already safer than the system we have now, and it almost completely removes the messy disorganized work in the spam forum.
Note that this suggestion refers to spam in the moderation queue, spam that gets through to the forums is a whole different problem. If regular Joe realizes they can kill an account with two spam reports it will get heavily misused.
Discuss.
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I have made a change. Let's see how this initial stage 1 affects the amount.
I have 2 more changes to make after this.
With regards to auto-kill, we did that and it was a disaster. Just one or two false positives slipping through caused high-rep members to have their accounts nuked. We need to err on the side of caution.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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It might be so that I'm alone with this opinion, but it's not the spam that is causing the problem at the moment, it's the spammers. The handling of them is unorganised at best.
Auto-kill was a disaster because it didn't have a safety catch, and honestly, what's there at the moment doesn't either, unless you're high-rep that is.
There is only one person that's checking the spam in the queue, and the others simply trusts that person. How is two or three people saying it's spam worse than one?
Anyway, make it more than two people checking the spam, make it necessary to have several spam messages to trigger an auto-kill, it's the principal I find important here, not the trigger levels.
It's the message that defines the spammer, not a post in a forum.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: one person that's checking the spam in the queue, and the others simply trusts that person
Jörgen Andersson wrote: make it more than two people checking the spam, make it necessary to have several spam messages to trigger an auto-kill
Doesn't statement 1 render statement 2 ineffective? I get the gist of what you're saying: "get a second opinion", but if people truly are following a single person then this is nullified.
You also wrote: A user should be blocked from posting whenever they have more than a certain number of messages in the moderation queue.
That's the idea, exactly. That's already on the list.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well, statement 1 is the current state, and statement 2 is a suggestion for how to change it. I don't see how statement 1 affects statement 2.
Anyway,
My original thought was that the owner accounts for all the messages that gets rejected in the moderation queue, should get moved to a purgatory list.
Accessible by for example protectors.
They should get marked with spammer probability weighed by activity. If they have more spam than proper messages (give or take) they get marked for deletion and will be purged after a week or so if no one marks them as OK.
And obviously the other way around for accounts having more proper messages than spam, they would need to be reported as spammer by a certain number of people.
The advantage of this type of system is that it more or less just automatises how it works today.
And the drawback, well I believe it would be quite a much bigger investment in time for you guys, that's my main reason for not suggesting it to start with.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: They should get marked with spammer probability weighed by activity
Can you give me an example? My feeling is that a message is either spam or not (give or take the rare instances where someone posts spam but doesn't realise they are being spammy - eg link to their own project or product that's posted in-context). So for me it's not about whether they have "more spam than proper messages". A single spam message means they are gone.
I guess I'm missing a nuance of your suggestion (sorry - been a busy and tiring week...)
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: A single spam message means they are gone.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Chris Maunder wrote: A single spam message means they are gone.
Agreed, I have no problems with that.
The problem is that mistakes happens, so there needs to be some kind of failsafe.
As has been pointed out by Tom Deketelaere, the sanity check he makes (as well as I do, and probably most others) is to check the account for more messages, articles, older than a day, positive reputation.
This could be done automatically.
An account that's less than a month old, no messages, questions, answers or articles, OR 302 points or less, could be pushed to the purgatory without any further notice.
But somewhere there is a border where there needs to be human intervention to check if there might have been a mistake.
I'm not going to say much about where those borders would be, you're the ones sitting on the statistics, but there would have to be more than just the spam to proper mails ratio.
The best thing would of course be if the spam in question could be quarantined together with the offending account.
But there would obviously be quite a lot of work involved in creating such a solution, which is why I first made the other proposal.
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: An account that's less than a month old, no messages, questions, answers or articles, OR 302 points or less, could be pushed to the purgatory without any further notice.
That is practical and sensible.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Jörgen Andersson wrote: There is only one person that's checking the spam in the queue, and the others simply trusts that person. How is two or three people saying it's spam worse than one?
While this is true, if the account actually has anything on it (more messages, articles, older than a day, positive reputation, ...) I always further investigate no matter who reported it in spam abuse.
Till today there have only been a very few (probably less than 5) where I didn't report (and explained why in the spam abuse forum), and I frequent that forum a lot. Like all who do I like to keep the place clean 
And if live can be made easier for the moderators then I'm all for it cause you guys are very busy at times.
Of course any improvement to the system can only benefit all off us.
Tom
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I just looked in the Spam/Abuse forum, and there's no mention my post from SEP27 that was marked spam/abuse by a relatively high-rep member. I feel slighted. I mean, c'mon - I dance on the edge for a reason...
We need a new user level here - "CodeProject Anarchist" - the icon would be Bob, dressed up as Darth Vader.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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Well the icons are so small that I'm not sure that what he's hold could be discerned, so it could be anything, even his love sword. Oops, there I am, dancing on the edge again.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I think you're losing your touch. Maybe even getting soft.
Settles helmet more firmly on head, cinches flak jacket a little tighter...
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Did you just challenge him?
Sit's back and watches as the chaos is unfolding
Tom
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Who'll bring the popcorn?
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Well, I'm just not as excited about stuff as I used to be I guess. I blame global warming.
BTA, shouldn't you be working on the DST problems that are plaguing the site?
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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No, you're not alone.
There's a lot of methods used to fight with spamm. I agree with you that message posted by member decide what it is, not a report posted on Spam And Abusive Watch board.
Please, see my proposal[^].
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To reduce the work needed to report a spammer (mod has to check queue, report, post message with link in forum, 10th person posts a message with gone) following suggestion:
[disclaimer]
I have no knowledge of how the queue works right now (I'v never seen it)
I have no idea how you would display it, I'm not really good at web front end stuff, but I'm sure you guys can come up with something
[/disclaimer]
I assume the queue has a button to report the post as spam or some other abuse.
I propose a button that does the following:
- report as spam (like now)
- report the user as spammer (like now ?)
- add the user to a list (new) (with a check if the user is already on it or not)
This list then get's displayed (see disclaimer) somehow on the forum.
Other members can then click the link to further investigate and report
On the 10th report on a account, this list get's checked to see if the members profile is in it, if so it get's removed from the list.
This should reduce a lot of the current work needed to report someone, without altering the current system (that works pretty well in my opinion)
Of course there will still be a need for the forum, since not everything goes thru the moderation queue but it should reduce the amount of posts.
PS: I can't use made up html tags anymore? had to replace <> with [], the tags didn't show up (and the text between them neither), and if I did just <> without closing it everything after it was gone. (I have 'use markdown formatting' turned off)
Tom
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Message Removed
modified 28-Sep-16 14:57pm.
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Last few days CodeProject site is under massive spammers attack. Spamm filters are working fine, but i was wondering about another options, which can help us in spamm protection:
- We can add more privileges to members, which belong to Protector[^] group.
I can see few solutions:
- 3 "spammer" reports on member account would lock spammer account for few minutes/hours. Spammer is unable to post any message in lock-time,
or
- 3 "spammer" reports on member account would delete account.
or
- 5 messages marked by protectors as "spamm" - see one of above options
- We can call reCaptcha[^] "filter" for those members whose activity is more than usual. An unusual activity can be defined as "more than 3 messages in 3 minutes" or else...
What you think about that?
modified 28-Sep-16 3:46am.
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The problem here is that it's a bot by the looks of things, so a short delay doesn't do much of any use - they would just switch to the next account quicker and come back later. They don't seem to have any shortage of "pre-made" accounts to work with!
I agree we probably could use a "weighting" to Protector accounts that mean it takes less to kill some of these Russians, but a chaptcha is the only way to stop them in their tracks. Having to use humans would probably mean they bugger off to SO or somewhere but would probably annoy a lot of "normal" users.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Action has been taken. There's more to come if needed.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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In my settings, "Currently in Daylight Savings" is checked, but I just uploaded a file to my uploads (at 1:36 central time) time), and in the list of uploaded files, it's showing a file time of 12:36.
Something ain't right.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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The funny part my message is in Soapbox.
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