How is the war on spambots going?

[Balázs Szakmáry]

Dear Atlassians!

This morning I had 59 e-mails from Atlassian Answers, 43 were "questions" by spam-bots. I presume you are doing something about this, but you seem to be losing. Could you please update the public on this issue a bit?

[Udo Brand · Accepted solution]

There is already a bug opened: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1679

[Jeremy Largman]

I've added an update over at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CQ-1679.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I highly recommend turning off all topic watching.

[Balázs Szakmáry]

That is my one and only way of being informed about what is going on on Atlassian Answers. Even with this level of spam, it is much less effort than browsing through the stuff manually.

[Norman Abramovitz]

I personally find it much easier to either manually scan the recent question list since the order of the questions does not change. I try to check every couple of days, so the list is rarely a few pages long or I click a topic to get the questions tagged that way to eliminate the questions I do not care about. For the questions I want to follow, I watch those individually. It allows me to avoid many unnecessary emails

[Norman Abramovitz]

Atlassian needs to attempt to put in anti-spamming features and until they do, I will try to avoid requesting emails from their websites. I saw a few days ago a spammer attempting to put in a link to jira.atlassian.com. At that time when I searched jira.atlassina.com site for the word tv (across all projects), there was about 30 issues with the word tv in it. Yesterday there was over 160 issues with the word tv in it. At this very moment there are 142. I assume someone is cleaning things up.

[Balázs Szakmáry]

They are cleaning things up constantly, but something seems to have changed over the weekend.

[Norman Abramovitz]

The tv/streaming bot has atlassian back on its list again. The issue has been bad for the past couple weeks. The bot is choosing better topics.