Slightly off topic - Spam in Answers

Nic Brough -Adaptavist-

The amount of spam in here is getting ridiculous and it's painful to remove (I feel very sorry for your admins who have to wade through all the reports)

It's noticable that the same culprits keep doing it - you really need to be able to flag a user as "blocked as a spammer" and be able to automatically remove (or at least hide until moderation) all their posts.

Another common and useful practice is to limit new users to a very small number of posts per day until they've built up a reputation without being flagged as spammers (it only needs to be a low number - the last place I worked had it set as "5 non spam posts and you're fine"). You can apply the same to a user - 10 separate spam reports and you automatically remove all their posts.

So, a while ago you posted something about improved spam checking, which obviously hasn't worked - any updates on proper systems of prevention and removal?

Jeremy Largman

Here's an update:

First of all, in addition to the editor which is still a bit wonky (especially when it comes to nice code formatting), spam mitigation is a top priority. It's critical to get this right. Many forums become overrun with spam and it's no good. Some amount of it is part of Internet life, but we can definitely take some steps to mitigate this.

As a first try, we added Akismet a few weeks back, for about a week. We got three reports of false positives (people whose legitimate questions were blocked) and spammers were still let through (they must've figured out a way around Akismet by now). We'll consider re-adding it, but it's unfortunate that it stops some legitimate posts.

@Matt Doar - There's a 'report' button underneath each post that allows you to flag it. It'll help me (or other admins) catch it, if I miss it in the feeds.

@Wojciech Seliga - good suggestion. Added in JIRA: Add ability to suspend user given enough Karma earned.

@David Simpson - Also a good suggestion: Limit number of posts by new users, or users with low karma.

Lastly, right now there's a bug - Unable to add Karma or suspend a user. We're just about to roll out the fix in the next day or two, and I'll go through and suspend all the spammers to date.