What is with all the daily SPAM posts that nobody bans? I block 5 to 10 new accounts every day so I don't see them. And how about the porn posts? I report them and nothing happens.

submitted by IkeConn from self.AskSaidIt

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[–]newguy 3 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 2 fun -  (6 children)

Because there's like 100 posts a day of it, and they change usernames every time. And there aren't any full time employees, it's just some volunteers. So why would you expect this place to be spam free? You expect a team of free people to survey this site 24/7 so you never have to look at an ad? Get real.

This is also exactly the foot in the door that's used to create censorship. So instead of complaining about ads, how about you are grateful to have a place where you can say what you want without being censored.

[–]package 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Spam posts are not the same as ads; the site isn't getting paid to display them and they generally contain malicious links or link to sites with malicious links. Suppression of such posts isn't a foot in the door for censorship and I'd actually argue the opposite, since spam posts drown out legitimate posts.

As for this site specifically, plenty of small sites, even ones with only a few admins and no paid employees, don't have issues with moderating spam. Typically all a site needs to effectively combat spam is countermeasures during account creation, such as captchas, and text based filtering for posts.

[–]newguy 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

So you're volunteering to do this 24/7 for the next few years yeah?

[–]package 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Captchas during account creation are a set and forget solution. Text based filtering does not require 24/7 attention nor does it require more than one person on a small site like this, which is my point. Clearly the site has inadequate moderation tools if it can't handle the type of spam that has been getting posted lately.

[–]newguy 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Captchas during account creation are a set and forget solution.

Saidit already has this.

Also text filtering doesn't work if the ad is different every time.

[–]package 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Saidit already has this.

The site may already have it, but the implementation clearly is not effective enough. It's just white text on a dotted background with a slight wave distortion, which in the present day will not defeat anything except basic scripts that don't check for images.

Also text filtering doesn't work if the ad is different every time.

Generally a text spam filter would check for things like blacklisted words or phrases (ie "bone conduction"), uncommon domains/subdomains/TLDs, unusual or excessive unicode, or other parts of the overall structure of the post as spammers usually use templates. It's very rare that spam posts would have no identifying characteristics for a text filter to catch.

[–]newguy 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah it could be better, but the attackers just change the ads to different words, or get better AI for the captchas. It's a never ending battle. It requires humans to moderate properly, I think