What's spam?
At 8 am EST. @lincoln2tg loaded laptop batteries on more than half of the first page of fresh. They buried all of the early morning posts.
by
bsalusa
asked 2 years ago
Hopefully staff is up bright and early this morning and they'll be gone soon!
That guy is spam I think. Pretty sure he added the same things yesterday actually.
I do not know how many batteries were loaded on other days. On one day it was at least 6. Today it was 12. The problem is that even if staff deletes most of their posts in a couple of hours, the early morning posts will be seen by a much smaller number of users. We do not know how many pages they choose to view.
I can just continue scrolling down the page and will have more page views available. I doubt that many users have autopager function. It has sure simplified my life. It works on ebay and many news sources.
@glindagw: Fixed.
I haven't seen anyone actually vote for this guy's and them make it to popular so they aren't getting much attention beyond cluttering up the fresh page which is just annoying.
@thefenst: see staff rocks, even if they aren't up with the birds like us.
@thefenst: Thanks. I hope that viewers look past the first couple of pages.
@thefenst: Thanks! Good morning and happy Monday to you.
and now we have @salebatt
@hobbit: Yeah, this is at least the third day in a row I've woken up to a slew of crappy battery deals... and I don't mean the good kind of crap that comes in bags.
I've noticed that the SPAM gets especially bad during times that staff is asleep or enjoying the weekend. And as many have pointed out, the staff deserve their weekends!
So what we need is a technological solution. I have an idea that (hopefully) wouldn't take too much programming. Add a counter for the number of tattles an item gets (just like votes). If enough people tattle on a deal, move it to a separate tab; call it "probation" or something similar. It would be the flip side of "popular." Essentially it would say, "folks, there have been complaints and we're investigating them. Caveat emptor goes double for these deals."
... And if you are a poster who regularly lands in the probation space, that can be programmed to be your default. Or if a vendor gets a bad rep, any links to that site can also go direcly to jail: do not pass go, do not collect $200.
My apologies if I have taken someone else's idea. I did a cursory search and found many good ideas... but not this particular one.
I've said this about a thousand times (or at least it seems like it), but I really wish there were a limitation on posting. I'm more interested in limiting new accounts, or perhaps accounts that haven't purchased anything (and are newish), but this is just going to continue to be a problem.
From the "furniture spammer" on till now, this seems to happen in waves, and although staff are excellent at fixing it, it still continues to show up, and to push everything off the fresh front page. Like any other spammer, there's no motivation not to do it. Posting is free, any eyeballs that go to their site have accomplished the purpose of massive posts in the first place, and I doubt they even care or notice that the deals get deleted, since they're just going to come back and do it again. Delete the account? They just make a new one.
Please, consider rate limiting new accounts. Just new ones. That wouldn't be so bad, now, would it?
@shrdlu: Limiting accounts will probably help with well-meaning but misguided people, but I doubt that it will fix the SPAM problem. You already noted that someone will simply make a new account if his/her account is deleted. By extension, anyone who wants to SPAM the site can simply create multiple accounts.
What I'm proposing allows the community to set the standard: if @hobbit, @bsalusa, and @lavikinga all think something is SPAM, it almost assuredly is. Moving SPAM posts to a probation section removes eyeballs from those postings, removing the incentive to play the system.
Admittedly, one could simply create a new site and register a new domain names every time wooters ding the current one. But that is much costlier. There are easier pickings elsewhere, so I doubt our eyeballs would be worth the hassle. Besides, I know someone with DNS lookup and a 3-day old flounder always at the ready.
It does occur to me that two new items would have to be added to the "tattle" pulldown: "SPAM" and "bad vendor". That way, we can differentiate between someone who inundates us with postings from NewEgg (bad poster, good vendor) and @lincoln2tg (bad poster, sketchy vendor).
After he mentioned getting 250+ hits in under an hour I asked about the conversion rate for the XXX deal that prompted a lot of conversation lately. @jimlee (the deal poster) was great about communicating with us about his deal and gave this answer: My conversion on deals.woot referrals as of 20 minutes ago is 4.09%. Highest conversion of in other referring site for me. In addition, avg pg/pv is just over 19, with a 5+ minute avg time on site. All of these numbers are higher than any other non SE referrer. Organic searches are nominally higher across the board.
Deals posted here are being picked up in search at an amazing rate. Spammers are the unfortunate side effect. We can ban accounts but they'll keep popping up. @heymo's idea about having tattles remove a deal (opposite of popularity votes) is great! It would probably be the fastest way to remove the deals and limit the positive results for the spammers.
@heymo: Yes we have been begging for those tools for ages.
@heymo: Are you suggesting an auto-mechanism that, after enough tattles, plucks the spammy deals from the fresh page and puts them in limbo until they can be investigated by the staff? I'd like something like that. Is such a thing even possible? I'm sure it is, but is it easily do-able?
( Only just now did it dawn on me what your screen name really is! At least what I think it means. Stooge fan?)
and now there is ktdann
@hobbit: The staff probably hasn't had the time to say "Hey, Heather. What's your damage??"
@lavikinga: no they were dealing with the server outage
@hobbit: Read your reply twice and both times I read it as "server outrage." Yeah, I'd be outraged if I was being spammed up the wazzoo too.
@lavikinga: That's the basic idea...
P.S. woo[t] woo[t], nyuk, nyuk!
@hobbit: You're right of course. My idea is just a variation of what others have suggested. I figure if we keep brainstorming we can come up with something that will work.
Unfortunately, I've realized that it isn't as simple as I initially thought. SPAM-y posters can be handled via the reputation score (or by adding just one field to the table where reputation is stored). But the other, equally important part is handling sketchy retailers-- that may require a whole new table. But at the same time, the deals site will need some way of filtering (or warning about) bad retailers eventually.
@heymo: I have a feeling sketchy retailers aren't allowed to be sponsored deals and if they prove they are sketchy after they have been sponsored they aren't allowed to be a sponsored deal again.
@hobbit: I hope you are right, but ikordesign.com from yesterday has some pretty bad reviews, and Bensoutlet.com is drawing some questions today. I hope deals.woot does some background checking on sponsored deals.
@hobbit: I think @heymo is talking about tracking untrustworthy sites in user-submitted deals.
This is one of those situations where I wish we had a down-vote option.
Let's say someone posts a great-sounding deal, but it's from a known scam-site....
Chances are that several people in the community know that it's a bad site.
Right now, all one could do is tattle. Two problems with this: 1) depending on the time/date, it could take a LONG time for the deal to be deleted; 2) the site might only be questionable and not flagrantly fraudulent - basically it currently might come down to a woot employee's gut reaction as to whether or not to delete the thread.
Let's consider a real world example: http://deals.woot.com/deals/details/705d9405-1aa1-48dc-8e3d-45ed0b7e8142. After seeing that on the popular tab, I posted a note that this really, REALLY isn't a good price. Others agreed, but the deal continued to get voted up - likely be people who didn't bother reading the replies.
(cont...)
(...cont)
If everyone who recognized that was a pretty bad price for a burner with those specs had been able to down-vote, it might have countered the exuberant up-votes of the unknowing masses, and maybe that crappy thread would not have made it to the Popular tab at all.
But we've been down that road and it's not going to happen.
Sorry, OP - I don't want to hijack your thread.
@anotherhiggins: Couldn't have said it better myself.
@anotherhiggins: right i know that, but that is what the comments are for. I do wish that there were better sites out there on the internet for rating retailers though. Some only have one comment. Right now we are using our own experiences, which is fine.
So right now folks can comment and warn people off. Now some people are going to be less than bright and still click, but you know they probably would have found the deal somewhere else and still clicked on it anyway. I do try to read comments and if I see one from say you, @shrdlu, @catbertthegreat, and basically anyone I know is trustworthy on this site (we really need badges that say trustworthy wooter) then I will most definately vote that up. Even on this side you can see Questions/rants that have 1 vote as the subject but go into the question and the first comment can have 15 votes because a lot of people agree with what was said, they may not voice it themselves but they will click the woot vote.
@hobbit: Weeelll, we have AtW & it's been a great resource for those of us that have figured out why it's here & how to use it. Would a "Rate the Seller" section work? Each thread would be titled with the .com name only. It would make it easier to do a search. Type in RipUOff.com into the search and only the review thread for that RipUOff.com pops up.
@lavikinga: we could do that, and maybe post a link in each deal? I am just trying to think of a way to make it work best. It might mean a lot of work for us though, because Staff has pretty much said no more tabs for a while.
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- 2 years ago
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- bsalusa
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