(Not a question) Let's talk about the spam...

Question

Ok, so when I'm writing this, there's 10 pages of questions with nothing but spam on them before the first real question appears. Seriously, something must be done...

I do my best to flag the spam messages when I see them, but there's a limit of how much questions an user can flag before the one hour wait, but I'm sure that even raising that limit would not be enough. I don't know exactly what kind of technology this site uses but, theres really nothing that can be done to stop this spam? A better anti-robot mechanism when registering? Or since half of the spam messages are about the same themes, is it possible to declare some key words as forbidden? (keto, imdb, marijuana, diet...)

Any mod out there who can do something?

Answer 1

I'm not a moderator but I am one of the small number of people who manually hide the spam questions being added to this site, and up until about a week ago we (not the royal we) only needed to so this activity 3-4 times a day. With the recent dramatic increase in the number of spam questions per hour we are getting the point where hiding such almost needs to be done on an hourly basis, and I (and likely the others involved) am not able (nor willing) to do that.

This web-site does run a number of anti spam addons supported by the software being used to supply the question & answer functionallity, but as you have noted those addons aren't up to the job.

The Twine Committee has discused this issue a couple of times but has yet to come up with an answer to the issue.

Comments

I do have mod powers, but functionally that just gives me the same hiding powers as Greyelf but I can also ban as I go (doesn't help). It is reaching critical mass and I'm not sure what can be done about it with the q2a software that hasn't already been done. I would imagine that suggestions are welcome.

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Has the Q2APro-Stop-Spam plugin been tried?  If so, has anyone considered modifying it to block posts with certain keywords in the questions (e.g. movie, keto, marijuana, etc.)?

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I know that spam plugins have been tried, I don't know which or how many, or how they were configured.

Answer 2

Hey there! Nice to see that there are real people here amongst the spam.

I was starting to go about the process of flagging articles, but there are clearly too many to keep up with – the spammers have won.

Which is a bummer, as I'd love to learn how to make better use of Twine (and navigate its bugs) with this community. I'm really excited by the potential it offers, and am absorbed in my first efforts with it.

If there's anything I can do to help, somone let me know!

Comments

For what it's worth, there's also the r/twinegames subreddit you can use.  Chapel and I are both mods there.

Answer 3

I know!

I really wish something could be done as Twine is a great tool and, in my opinion, almost single-handedly revived the IF genre.

Somebody save the forum!