What should we do with spam, which is actually vaguely relevant?
09.01.2010
Relevant Spam
5 Responses to “Relevant Spam”
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Would it be possible to do something to hide spam comments, and remove any links from them? A simple report button, and a "The following comments have been marked as spam. Click here to show them." approach?
Also, if the comments come from an unregistered user, could you get each author to approve individual comments from unregistered users?
I know this doesn't scale well, but I think it would provide a reasonable solution.
We already have a "flag" content functionality, which nobody uses.
Marking comments as spam would work, but I don't really see the need, cuz I usually chheck all comments personally (I know – bad scaling).
The issue here is that the spammer actually contributed to the post, with something remotely reasonable, and added a link to a service within the field…
I think it may be an idea to investigate if we can get a mechanism whereby unauthorised comments have to be approved before displaying.
I think there are a lot of people who are earning peanuts by promoting various websites, and some of them find RedGloo with its .ac.uk domain attractive.
We could do a bit of research about the growth in this sort of comment…
CAPTCHA works well against bots however if people are being paid to do it it's more difficult to prevent. I think the best way is to act on a case-by-case basis when removing items.
I think I'll just keep doing what Daniel suggests. After all we "only" have a couple of spammers a week, and that is managable – if it goes up then hmnn…