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Call the Cleaners
I'm all for light to no moderation. A decent community is largely self-policing and will take care of itself - see TrollCritic 3K/4K.
Unfortunately, there's nothing the community can do about blatant spam by posters (professional spammers) like this one. I'm calling on the TPM powers that be to take care of this infestation.
It might make sense to have those "report abuse" buttons/links on blog posts. A sort of anti-recommendation. After a certain number of anti-recommends, a cleaner in authority could be notified, and would then evaluate the situation and take appropriate action. That way, no one needs to babysit the blogs but spammers can be booted off when necessary.
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Comments (5)
I wonder whether Bayesian techniques could be applicable here - with enough "spam" blog posts, TPM could probably identify with high accuracy which posts are legitimate commentary, and which are advertisements, using the same basic algorithm Bayesian spam filters use. And in the unlikely event that a valid post was mistakenly marked as spam, a human could appeal the programmatic decision, and Andrew or some other TPM editor could reinstate such a post.
May 31, 2008 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I suspect that TPM (luckily) isn't getting enough spam to properly train Bayesian filters. But if the problem got worse, this is a good idea.
May 31, 2008 10:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
BTW - I also am all for the no-moderation policy, but I concur that we don't want advertising to crowd out discussion.
And to clarify, I'd consider a Bayesian filter for blog posts, but not for comments. Comments have much less text to work with, so a filter would be less likely to be accurate. Although if it became necessary to try to filter comments also, it might suffice to ensure that the poster username is given strong weight, and users with no comments are presumed more likely to be spamming than those with lots of "positive" comments.
May 31, 2008 10:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
I believe that once when I emailed the admins (through the "comments and news tips" button at the top right hand corner of your screen) about a disturbing stalker who'd profiled a member he hated, the post was removed. They're not going to get into deleting offensive posts, but I've seen spam go away, too. So email Josh and let him know.
The good thing is that I don't think any of those spam posts got a recommend, so they're just about gone from the lists.
May 31, 2008 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sending e-mails is just so low-tech.
May 31, 2008 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
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