If you get "auto-moderated" in upcoming weeks, will you let the mods know?
Asked by
Mariah (
25883
)
July 27th, 2016
I’ve just added some new code to the site to “auto-moderate” some obvious spam. I think the definition of “obvious spam” that I used in the code is very strict, such that it might miss some spam, but should not auto-moderate any legitimate questions.
I don’t want to publicize the exact algorithm here, since spammers could see it and use that information to get around the auto-moderation, but if you PM me I will tell you.
Anyway, if you get a question auto-moderated, you will be redirected to your question as usual after asking it, but you will see the “This question has been deleted” banner and a flag that says ”[REJECTED]” next to your question. If you get this and the question was legitimate, will you please contact the mods to let me know so I can change the code?
Thank you!
PS: Sorry if you’ve tried to ask a question in the last five minutes and it hasn’t worked, that was my fault during the code changes.
PPS: I’m going to add a link here as a test of the new code, you can ignore it:
http://www.google.com
Observing members:
0
Composing members:
0
25 Answers
OK. Thanks for the hard work anyway. Save me from constant flagging too.
Yay! I’ll definitely let you know. It will be great if this works on just half the spam, let alone all of it.
Awesome.
I hope it works swimmingly.
Glad you guys are psyched! I am too. This was a long time coming, I shoulda done it sooner.
Most of our spam shows up at night. I’m excited to see what happens tonight! Mods will get emails for all auto-modded questions so we’ll be able to gloat over all the work we didn’t have to do in the morning.
Thanks for all your hard work!
@Mariah: You should make it so any question that has the word “viagra” or “garage door” in it is just assumed to be spam. :)
I can see that spam questions have disappeared. Now only those answers and profiles remain. But I’m a bit concerned for newcomers. Will they be put off by seeing their questions rejected on their first day?
Lol @jca you jest, but when I was in the code I did find that we had some insta-ban phrases in the code that apparently used to be a big issue for spam. They were pretty funny, too, they were:
“practical explanation about next life”, “supreme lord krishna”, “explanation or disprove gravity”
Good news: the automod killed 5 spam questions last night. Bad news: There were a lot of other spam questions that got through. Good news: I found a mistake in the automod code that was causing it to miss some of the spam questions it was supposed to detect, and I’m fixing it today, so it should work better tonight.
@Mimishu1995 The automod is only killing questions that fit a very specific format that no legitimate user should ever be using. I highly doubt any “real” newbies will be modded off by the automod. Trust me, I don’t want to alienate new users either! :)
Thank you @Mariah. I usually am on at night. And yeah, had to sift through lots of BS.
Well, but that’s the ideal course, @Mariah. Slowly build the spam killer so that it nets more and more spammers without catching real jellies.
Perfecto squish!
Maybe as a fun exercise you could ocumentday it in igpay atinlay.
The spammers who work their way through that might be entertaining enough that we’d want to keep them around.
Thanks so much! I noticed there were no spam questions during the usual 9 to 11 PT spam fest period, and none this morning
@Mariah Thank you so much for volunteering to be a moderator and investing the time in this Auto Ban the Spam project. It is through members like you that Fluther continues to be a better community, especially compared to other Q&A sites.
Looks like automod caught all of last night’s spam. :D
Thanks for your kind words, gelatinous bretheren!
@Mariah, thank you so much for your coding. Although it’s only been a few days, it seems successful.Huzzah!
Answer this question 
Composing members:
0
