Is there any way we, as users, can help deal with the waves of spam-meds-bots? When I get the chance I downvote, but that's not possible for microblog. Do reporting them have any effect, or they go in the pile and are more a nuisance than a help?
If we blocked the culprit users, would it do anything other than us personally, even by just reducing their visibility?
Reporting them at the very least sends a message to the mods of the community the reported post/comment was on. Not sure about how/when it goes to instance admins, though. Which is where they really need to be reported to. Mods can block them from their community, but a spammer (human or bot) generally affects the entire server so it needs to go all the way to the top.
Blocking them also works to at least reduce the bots’ effectiveness. If everyone blocks it, it isn’t doing anything but wasting bandwidth, and if it’s not having the desired effect whoever deployed it might give up.
Most of the communities with significant spam problems have no moderators other than ernest. It's up to him to recruit more people to help moderate those.
In his most recent announcement, he said he's bringing 2 new instance mods. But I couldn't find the actual announcement post for the new team members. Unfortunately, these days Ernest often disappears for days or weeks at a time, so there's really no telling when we'll see the impacts of this.
Blocking is a personal thing, there’s no heuristic that determines if a specific user is blocked by x people to automatically block them for users. That would be quite appealing though, but the abuse potential is quite significant, if you have a bot army…
Reporting will notify the moderator(s) of the community, so if and how fast they react really depends on them.
I once again ask why there is no form of filtering, especially for new users who rapid post. Also spammers using the same names with a higher number after they get banned.
I registered the next-in-sequence for one of them. Haven't seen that username since. I like to think I broke a script somewhere, but it could just as easily have broken a spammer's tiny little brain. The disappointing but more likely explanation is that they shrugged and moved on to a different set of usernames.
Is there a way to leverage down votes to limit content, at the magazine or instance level? I think I know the answer, but it would be dandy to put in place
This is easy to ask for, but not easy to implement.
The problem I see (and what influenced the tone of my other comment) is that I don't think I've seen any acknowledgement about any sort of filtering and this is a persistent problem. I get it, but also it seems really unnecessary to manually remove the 10 threads obviously not made by humans (or even just the 3 accounts that just popped up in a close time-frame).
It doesn't need to be perfect, surely any technique can be worked-around eventually but that also introduces extra steps (that spammers don't need to take now) that makes it harder and less likely. Doing so I think makes moderation much more viable and impactful.
Even just some sort of auto-spoiler/warning (multiple suspicious keywords in a non-relevant community, new user, 3 threads in an hour etc) could have an effect.
Starting to feel like there's more SPAM than posts on Kbin, at this point.
I sort by new and comb through reporting "SPAM" and blocking users, but it's a never-ending cycle it seems and users reported for SPAM are still posting (hence why I block them in addition to reporting the individual posts).
Actually, it would really help if the "Block" button was right next to the username on the spam post. Having to hover over the name and wait for the modal to appear and then go click on "Block" makes it more of a nuisance. I wonder also if in the future you could choose not to display posts by user accounts less than a month old with only downvotes or who have been blocked by hundreds of people.
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