Spam filter idea.
I know that deals employs some pretty fancy and fun comment and deals spam filtering, but are comments that have the exact same link posted twice (in one comment) automagically filtered or flagged? I can't see or foresee any reason for a normal comment to have the same link posted twice in one comment.
by
thepenrod
asked 10 months ago
Not a bad idea, but how many spam comments would this prevent? Do you have a few examples?
@shawnmiller: I'd hate to see examples, since that would mean that they were still there. ;-} It may be that @thepenrod was thinking of those crazy counterfeiter sites that show up with the 20 line (or so) comments about their site, and the site name that they want you to visit is somewhere in the comments. I've never seen a single valid comment that looked anything like those.
@shawnmiller: I think @thepenrod is on to something here. The spammers in question typically have brand-spanking new accounts and they typically stick URLs in their messages.
So upon submission, maybe check the age of the account; if it is below some age threshold, work your regex magic to check for a string resembling a URL.
If it contains a URL, you then have options: simply vanish the posting (my personal preference) or alternatively flag it for human followup.
@shrdlu: I think the idea is valid. What I'm trying to gather is an estimate of how many spam comments this will actually block so we can prioritize this idea with several others.
@shawnmiller: When I see this strike, typically in the wee hours, when there's only a skeleton staff to handle it, I've seen as many as 50 or 60 show up, hitting multiple deals on the Popular page, sometimes for two or three pages. I always admire how quickly it gets dealt with, once reported.
While many spammers are hard to spot (programmatically), I think those particular types would be easier to pattern match.
@shawnmiller: @capguncowboy provided a correct illustration. I forget where I saw the most recent comment, but it was 20 min. before posting this question (I had to search to see if somebody else brought it up and then I discovered the bug that's been plaguing the Community side lately). Anyhoo, it wasn't the first time I'd seen the double inclusion of the same link on a spam comment and it just popped into my head. I don't know how many, though, i see one every few days. I do think it would save a lot of staff time going through and deleting all of them. I also think your feature of letting the spammer see it post before it's deleted is awesome and could work well with such a filter.
@thepenrod: Genius!
It will save my downvotes ;-)
Spammers are pretty smart. I think they'd catch on and only start posting 1 URL in a matter of days. They have probably already read this thread... lol
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