Is there a way to prevent people from posting spam and advertisements off of Fluther?

I’m not sure there’s any way to do it that wouldn’t prevent people from linking sites for legitimate reasons. Generally, automated filters end up causing as many problems as they solve. Even if there is a way, it would probably be really complicated to try to incorporate, and we aren’t exactly going for complicated updates lately.

I’ve noticed the spam, too, though. The past couple mornings we’ve had someone join and spam 30–40 questions. The person does it early enough in the day that the answers stay around a while before they get banned. I am starting to wonder how beneficial it would be to have the option to flag a profile rather than just flagging individual posts in these instances. However, I suspect that would be a lot of work to implement, and we lack a team to do it.

Sometimes I’ll see an announcement in the Community Feed announcing that something with a name like “GreatShoeDeals” has joined the collective.

When that happens, I contact the staff and send them a heads-up with a link to the potential spammer’s profile.

Not possible to totally eliminate spam. Captchas and other “human” tests block most of it, but some spammers (especially individuals just starting their own web businesses) will log on to sites manually and post their spam manually. No way to stop that.

I wish it could. It would save us a lot of time putting out fires. Burning Spam doesn’t smell all that good, either.

Spam elimination cannot be automated. That’s one of the reasons we need human moderators. Flagging spam posts alerts us to the spam account, however, so we can remove the post, ban the user, and remove any other spam posts they’ve made. So please: keep on flagging!

It can’t be done. Spam bots will forever lurk around the corner everywhere.

That’s what moderators are for and an active user base who reports the misuse via flagging.

Human moderation is key to keeping spam at bay. Unfortunately, they’re persistent little buggers. Thanks for flagging them!

The mods are persistent little buggers, too.

By the way, why does it seem like so many spammers are being attracted to Fluther. Reading the Alexa stats on Fluther doesn’t make us sound like a great place to advertise on.

Over a period of three months, a whopping 0.0059 % of internet users visit this site.

Some 0.000158 % of all page views occur on Fluther, with is only 1 / 40315 that of Facebook.

Only 65 % of visits to Fluther involve just one page view.

Spammers aren’t picky. They advertise everywhere. Besides, just having links to your website appear on other pages is part of the whole SEO process. Getting it in front of human eyes isn’t the only goal.

@SavoirFaire Thanks for the enlightenment.

The only possible way I can imagine you stopping them would be by locking down the site in security measures. It would not doubt make things suck a fair bit.

You would need to do things like make people wait 24 hours before they can use their account, or have them restricted to answering questions only until 100 lurve scored. Personally I think we could use a few more questions to answer, so that would not sound good to me, neither do any of the other possibilities I can imagine.

Maybe we could restrict people from posting links and giving lurve until they get 5 lurve (one GA). This would be easier for legit new users to cope with, while spammers actually have to write out a response that is worthy of a GA. I think that not allowing new users to post questions is useless, because most spam is in the form of answers.

The link thing could be a good idea if it could be implemented. Spammers don’t tend to give out lurve, though, and I wouldn’t want to stop legitimate users from being able to give lurve right away. I think I gave out a bit before I wrote my first answer, and I definitely gave out a lot more before receiving my first GA (since I joined in the dead of night on Christmas and spent a few hours here reading). That’s actually one of the (many, many) reasons I never joined Yahoo! Answers: too many hurdles to jump before you can actually do anything.

@SavoirFaire I included the “no giving lurve” because I envisioned the spammers creating two accounts and lurving each other. But, now that I think about it, getting a GA requires answering a question, and that answer is likely to be spam, if the person is a spammer. So, we can drop that constraint and change it to “no links until five lurve.”