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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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November 03, 2012 09:47:52am |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
There is tons of spam in the forum, some of it pretty bad (pirates selling wares, links to malware). Discouraging. Wish there was a forum(s) moderator ie. someone from the community who volunteers to watch and clean up spam.
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Poster:
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aibek |
Date:
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November 03, 2012 08:25:47pm |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
The problem with spam can be classified under these heads:
(i) (a) It disfigures the pages.
(b) If the volume were large the forum would become useless. Thankfully, this is not the case now.
(ii) It may mislead a few. I am not sure, but I suspect it would mislead only those who are new to internet. But, such people are
lost anyway! In the cases that the spam is very convincing, I have come across people mentioning that the above post is suspect -- like your post on the “Gigapedia ebooks” page -- and that probably is a good way to deal with it.
(iii) It misleads the larger internet community, by increasing the page ranks of the linked spam pages. Again, I am not sure, but I guess that this effect would be very little.
Now, (i)(a) is bad, but to solve it requires some work -- and that time can be more usefully spent elsewhere! If I were the maintainer, I too would have let this level of spam just be. Forum moderators would be fine, but you must remember that IA differs from other forums in that the posts are open forever, while the others lock the post after some time. So, moderators would have to take care of the old pages too, and it would not be an interesting or easy work. I guess the best way is to let this low level of spam collect and let a pattern develop, and then every once a while purge them.
http://archive.org/post/435872/420000-gigapedia-ebooks
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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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November 03, 2012 09:18:07pm |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
It would take 5 minutes a day to keep this forum clean of spam. It's not a burden on anyone's time. The solution to spam is well known: filter and delete the spam. If Internet Archive can't do it they should enlist trustworthy volunteers to do it for them, just like every other serious forum on the Internet already does.
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Poster:
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aibek |
Date:
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November 03, 2012 11:29:40pm |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
If volunteers can be found, certainly! But I know that I would not want to do it.
Also, note that filtering is not without problems. You must have noticed that having your post caught in a false positive is very irksome. There has been more than one case where I stopped going to the forum when it happened to me.
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Poster:
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 greenone |
Date:
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December 22, 2012 08:16:52am |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
There are volunteers. We have to sleep though. :)
There's a ton of stuff that comes in during "normal business hours" that we eliminate quickly, but the stuff that crops up overnight is becoming a bit more burdensome.
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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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December 22, 2012 05:48:29pm |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
How do we report spam? I've seen spam that is never deleted. Thanks, glad to hear there are volunteers!
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Poster:
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greenone |
Date:
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December 23, 2012 06:23:27am |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
Post in the forums. We keep an eye on the posts here, though the signal to noise is pretty low at the moment. :P Links are greatly helpful and appreciated.
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Poster:
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aibek |
Date:
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December 22, 2012 05:19:17am |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
Admins, it is time to do something about spam!
It may be useful to start a post asking for suggestions. Users will likely have many ideas.
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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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December 22, 2012 08:53:52am |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
Spam is like graffiti. If you let it go, it just gets worse. The only way to fight it is 100% no tolerance by deleting every instance. Otherwise they'll keep coming back because they know it works. And word gets around, and other spammer show up.. Internet Archive is a prime target due to its SEO weight, the dozens (100s?) of un-moderated message groups, and the million of users who visit IA. I'm surprised the User Review's have not also been a target, but maybe they are.
Anyway, solutions? Moderation. There are too many groups IMO for the staff to moderate every one, rather they should be enlisting the free volunteer help of the community, the same volunteers who help out other ways already, the same volunteers who also have Wikipedia accounts etc. on Wikipedia spam is a non-issue because volunteers ensure there is no spam. It would be a small commitment for a volunteer to watch a few groups via an RSS feed, but it would depend on the software features to allow for it, and someone to moderate the moderators.
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Poster:
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aibek |
Date:
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December 22, 2012 07:56:12pm |
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
‘Moderating the moderators’ is easy. Just add a line to the text in the deleted page: “If your message was wrongly deleted, please write to info@archive.org.”
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Poster:
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jeno61 |
Date:
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December 28, 2012 05:49:42pm |
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Forum:
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Re: What's the best way to report spam? |
Is there any aversion to using a simple CAPTCHA or limit the frequency with which a new user can enter posts?
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