Too many spam comments in many thread.

Seems like Phillip is busy in china. But AFAIK there are few more moderators, correct?

Very good that you opened this discussion again.

There are several and before Plilipp can make possible technical improvements moderators activity is very, very important .

I'm a moderator, and in the second half of December I was spending more time fixing spam than reading and writing in the forum.

In early January I was away for a week and did no moderating, but even since I've been back I've taken a break from the moderating. It was just too discouraging to have to clean things up before I could settle down to read the forum.

At one of my sites (uclue.com) I moved to distributed moderation, which has effectively solved the spam problem. Here's how it works.

When a new comment is posted, it isn't displayed to the public, only to "regulars" (those with the right cookies). They see this message above the new comment: "Please help us to fight spam by classifying this message: Spammy, Unsure, Not Spam". The links are asynchronous (AJAX), so the person can just click an option and go on reading the forum. There's no need to wait for a page reload or anything. It's as close to effortless as it can be.

I experimented with the weightings, and this is what worked best: a click on "spammy" corresponds to a score of minus 60, a click on "unsure" corresponds to a score of minus 10, and a click on "not spam" corresponds to a score of plus 60. When the score reaches -100, the spam is deleted. When the score reaches +100, the spam is accepted.

So, in the normal situation only two people see a spam before it is deleted, and only two people need to classify a non-spam before it is displayed to everyone. This is such a small percentage of users that hardly anyone ever sees a spam.

The "unsure" rating proved to be important. Quite often, a spammer disguises their spam really well, to make it seem legitimate. In this case, people were reluctant to click "spammy" because of basic human courtesy and a willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt. To stop these spams getting through, a new post is still deleted if lots of people click on "unsure". I think it's fair enough that the obligation is on the poster to make sure that their post is "obviously" not spammy.

I have one additional limitation, which is that a user may have no more than three new posts at one time. This prevents spam flooding. As soon as their posts are classified as non-spammy, they can post again. Obviously for a forum like this one, the limitation of three pending posts would need to be by IP address and date rather than by account login, but that shouldn't be a problem.

In this way, the spam problem is effectively solved at uclue.com and I think the same system would work well here.

I have to think about this issue. E.g. preventing "flooding" sounds like a very good measure. Whenever I come here I also see spam and delete maybe 4 or 5 of them. I have a copy of every deleted comment in my inbox, so I can do a number check on them.

Another approach is to require a person to be a regular reader of the forum before they post.

Spammers don't read the forums they post to, so perhaps it's enough require that a user has visited the site on five separate days before they can post.

Philipp wrote:
> Whenever I come here I also see spam and
> delete maybe 4 or 5 of them

I just cleaned the spam from the first page of forum topics, and I deleted 47 spams. And that's without deleting spams like
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/176771.html
where a forum member responded in good faith to the spam so deleting the spam would make the page confusing.

Philipp
I think you can crawl the forum & see most active 5 or most active 10 users in last one month with PR10 and make them also moderator.

I'm certainly not one of those, I mostly pull it on RSS and come to see interesting threads only :)

In any case this forum runs on good gesture of "high PR" users, this way they will be able to help more.

Thouhts