Quarantine/Embargo of new projects and users
Yann Guidon / YGDES wrote 11/03/2016 at 14:59 • 2 pointsHello dear community,
As the question of spam is trending again, I have thought about reasonable, fair and efficient measures that the HaD team could implement quickly to reduce the annoyance.
One modest proposal is embargoing projects of new users for a few hours.
Spammers are of the "quick-fire" kind because they know they are spotted quickly. They need to get their message out (to the rest of the Internet and the search engines) before they are moderated.
The embargo I propose is : don't let the new users and their new projects be seen by the outside world for a few hours. This gives us enough time to moderate them away, and they have no incentive to post here.
The embargo (new pages are only visible to logged-in users and the authors) is a tiny annoyance but negligible in the grander scales. At least, I can live with it.
Another twist : reconduct the embargo on the user for a few hours, for each new created project. If user U creates 10 projects in 10 minutes, this would translate in 10 or 20 hours of embargo. OTOH in my most inspired periods, I can create a useful project every day or half day... and I'm not a new user.
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Another question is : often, "inappropriate" projects are created by "inappropriate" users so the two need to be linked somehow... Why report X projects when erasing the root of the problem (the "user") should just do ?
Thank you for your attention, and please dear admins, keep in touch with us.
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The embargo sounds like a practical tool for dealing with spammy users. I don't think it's very inconvenient since the projects can still be seen from the inside and the embargo is for a really brief time in the grand scheme of things.
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Tthat's what I thought too.
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Hey - thanks for the feedback! Actually we have just implemented something along these lines an hour ago :) It won't solve all the problems but it will definitely make things better. We have a few more things queued up too.
P.S. We are moderating this at the user level - when we detect spam we do wipe both the user and all of its projects. It's just that the process has been fairly manual & policy-oriented so far (in order to prevent accidentally doing harm to legit users) but given that spammers are getting more and more aggressive & annoying, we have to step up our game too.
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Thank you, good luck and don't hesitate to ask for our help !
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