Looks like Hubski has grown enough to attract the attention of spammers who go beyond basic linking. In case of linkspam ignoring them usually was enough, but ignoring, muting and hushing the comment spammers doesn't hide their posts.
Self promotion should be acceptable as long as it is relevant and contributes, posting the exact same comment on topics tagged #bitcoin, no matter how relevant the comment is to the post, shouldn't be.
As Hubski grows, this will only get worse, and current self moderation options don't go far enough, especially in topics without many comments.
Maybe a "report spammer" button to take care of these?
User in question: https://hubski.com/user?id=billtony
I view these sorts of things as an opportunity. Theoretically, here's how the system should work: 1) Spammer shows up. 2) You, and everyone who thinks like you, identifies them as a spammer and gives them the ol' triple block 3) The spammer ends up without an audience Theoretically, there's no moderation needed - and that's what "report spammer" means. There's no way to deal with "spam" without assuming some form of moderation. The downside to this comes with tag taxonomy and new users. A new user looking for stuff about writing is likely going to subscribe to #writing... which is also the tag any spammer is going to find. A seasoned user looking for stuff about writing knows that it's in #writebetterdammit, which is something spammers won't find without a substantial commitment to the site. I took over /r/realestate on Reddit when it was nothing but a honeypot for spammers. It still gets gobsmacking amounts of crap. We use automoderator like a rented mule, and we're merciless. As a result, it's a useful sub, but beating back the bullshit took a substantial investment of time. I can see that sort of thing happening to a tag as Hubski grows... ...which is why some sort of searchable/merge-able taxonomy so that tags can be parsed via a system other than "folklore" is perhaps the most important thing to make Hubski scalable towards a larger userbase.
Agree 100%. It's not taxing on us as current users to ignore/mute the spam accounts as they appear. If spam bots were to add this site into their portfolio, what would new users see when they come here? They are automated so they don't care whether there is an audience or not; SEO is a goal for many of them so having their link here may be all they're after. Will every thread contain 20 spam comments with the rest of us acting like it isn't happening because we don't see it? Should new users be expected to spend their first hour of being here ignoring & muting every spammer or finding the more obfuscated tags? I'm sure the team has considered this. Hopefully it never reaches that point or there are more creative solutions to the problem. But I don't know if taxonomy is the solution; essentially it's just tagging tags.There's no way to deal with "spam" without assuming some form of moderation.
That's really what it comes down to. A parameter like "sensitivity to other users' ignore/mute/hush decisions" would allow a user to, say, auto-ignore/auto-mute any user that had been ignored or muted by 1-2-a dozen users. Set the threshold lower, see more muted/ignored comments. Set the threshold higher, miss it. You're right, taxonomy isn't the solution to this particular problem, more an end-run around the problem. /r/feminism gets a lot more spam than /r/twoxchromosomes for the simple reason that an auto-search finds "feminism" faster; however, /r/reportthespammers shut down recently because the very nature of "spam" has changed. I just want better taxonomy because it's important.Will every thread contain 20 spam comments with the rest of us acting like it isn't happening because we don't see it? Should new users be expected to spend their first hour of being here ignoring & muting every spammer or finding the more obfuscated tags? I'm sure the team has considered this.
...which is why some sort of searchable/merge-able taxonomy so that tags can be parsed via a system other than "folklore" is perhaps the most important thing to make Hubski scalable towards a larger userbase.
-yep.
We will discuss this on our weekly Monday call. Anyone reading this, by all means put forth ideas, tweaks to current functions etc and it will be considered. For the meantime, I'd suggest using what kleinbl00 referred to as the 'ol triple block -remember that enough of these will keep their posts out of the global feed. Comments on the other hand... -we need to work on this. Thanks in advance for any ideas/discussion.
In regards to potential moderation, I just want to point out the risk of moderators' abuse of power--in the distant future anyway, I imagine whoever is chosen to mod atm is an absolutely trustable person involved in the inner workings of the site.. but you're going to always need more and more mods if you choose that path, and things can go sour quick.
We have no intention of choosing that path. There has to be other options....
Then this right here is where Hubski innovates. We've got some wicked minds here, put em together something will work.
It doesn't seem any worse than the metals guy who showed up about a year ago and faded away. I think that it's not worth getting too concerned about it until it's a real problem. I'm sure that the folks in the back office need to and will give it some careful thought, planing ahead for a time when the spam-war goes from hot to cold.
Just wanted to point out a fresh case of asshole
Oops. I just saw this thread. I'm pasting what I said in the other thread here. Okay - so - serious answer. We knew this day would come. We need to either find a way to extend ignore to comments or a way to implement an automated global-mute that is similar to global-ignore. I have qualms about global-mute mostly because it's filtering comments and the people posting the post don't know that those comments are being automatically hidden from their posts. Having "ignore posts" and "ignore comments" functionality might work - and come in handy for other cases besides spam. Perhaps I like a user's comments and conversations but hate seeing their endless and badly tagged posts about particular styles of music in my feed. Right now there is no way to ignore a user's comments from appearing but we've obviously reached a stage where having that available is necessary. We've also talked about thresholds for new users as well as for the global ignore automation. I don't know if thresholds for posts or commenting is necessary yet but it probably will be as we grow. Also, someone who is on Hacker News a lot should let us know how their hiding comments automatically experiment is going. I still really dislike the entire concept but there may be some aspect of it that is a good idea that we could evolve/change for Hubski. There was a lot of discussion on the what hubski can learn from forums thread about implementing features like these.
I think kicking Hubski off all robots.txt respecting search engines would help against spammers here just for the SEO. Had been suggested by kleinbl00 to keep random mooks who arrive via Google out, but also helps with this. Alternatively, we could take advantage of the nofollow attribute, a la Wikipedia. Not as effective as disallowing all, but still better than nothing. These won't be helpful against "direct spam" though.
I just looked into the guy and his motivations. I truly cannot decipher whether he is attempting SEO keyword spam / backlink spam or attempting to garner clicks from the Hubski userbase. Regardless, neither are well-educated or are going to be a successful endeavor. Hubski's google ranking is far less than other sites and there are sites that are literally made for SEO backlinks and keywords to increase your rank on Google search. The Hubski userbase is full of avid internet users with above average intelligence, above average skepticism, and an above average number of people using AdBlock and Ghostery. I would be very surprised if anyone got any users to fall for scam / spam by posting obvious spam on Hubski. A quick Google search shows that this guy or team of guys is really dedicated to having fake conversations on bitcoin related forums trying to pump up excitement for their obvious scam. Most falls in 2013 when they were "pre-launch." They are pretty good at SEO as it's hard to find a legitimate post about the scaminess of their site without diving headfirst into a pile of fake comments saying it's not a scam.
Just a thought, maybe they are using a "nuke from orbit" approach? Spam forums with both high and low rankings and skeptical users and non skeptical. The ones with a high SEO ranking appear in Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo results making it seem like they are effective, but we don't see the smaller forums they attacked because they have a low page rank. Forums that have people who aren't tech savvy fall for this while tech savvy forum users are mildly annoyed.
This is the first case where I've had to ignore, mute, etc. I think waiting and seeing if it's effective or not is the best way to go for now. I'm active in the #bitcoin tag - and I definitely noticed that user today. Their account is brand new. I noticed the linked page had vietnamese on it so I replied and told them to vomit blood (I think). It's so clearly a ponzi, and I hope no one falls for it.