Good heavens my post was hidden for using the word b1t c0in , and I can’t even edit it. That’s horrible. Shame on BA.
We get a LOT of bitcoin spam, so it’s auto-moderated.
But of course it’s not flagged for you or any of your enormous amount of spam.
Well of course, since admins and moderators have control over flagged messages that wouldn’t make sense…
Yes, of course I was being facetious, but to auto flag single, non-profane, words with no regard for context is horrible. For one thing it doesn’t allow users to read it and decide for themselves. Does the flagging system have any kind of heuristics or ability to parse meaning?
I don’t see what’s so horrible about it as it helps us keep the site clean of spam, and we typically clear flagged posts under the hour. If you want to know the details of how Discourse works, I recommend you visit https://meta.discourse.org
It makes it more complicated to offer payment in b1t c0in for work, unless people talk in 1337 (which, by the way, is something that spammers might do).
Spam filters for e-mails exist since a long time, and they use much better methods. It is a bit silly that Discourse uses a blacklist of words.
It doesn’t make it hard at all because we clear those flags pretty quickly, and your message will typically be posted within an hour.
We also use Askismet for spam filtering, but sometimes spam still gets through for certain keywords and it’s more efficient for us to blacklist them and manually moderate.
To give you an idea, today alone I moderated three spam messages about bitcoin that were not caught by Akismet.
I’m confused – looks like you’re saying this is quick and usually takes less than an hour, while Photox is saying her post referring to a payment method frequently mentioned by spammers isn’t cleared yet. If I’ve understood correctly, then why hasn’t that post been cleared?
The post was already cleared.
Ah, thanks!
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I didn’t realize that there was a fast moving queue. It’s a fundamental difference that I didn’t know and seems quite reasonable.
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Its interesting to me that bitcoin is becoming more and more popular, but i too have seen pretty sketchy posts where spammers mention bitcoin as payment.
I understand the inconvenience, but i completely agree with bartv, its better to have a more aggressive spam filter, and instead manually deal with the exceptions.
Im not sure if payment should be discussed publicly in the first place, and as far as i know there are no filters for DMs so you can contact the individual directly.
Regarding the automatic process: Is there a way to change the Message which is sent after a post was auto-moderated?
[…]Your post was flagged as inappropriate : the community feels it is offensive, abusive, or a violation of our community guidelines.
Multiple community members flagged this post before it was hidden, so please consider how you might revise your post to reflect their feedback.[…]
This sounds a little offensive if you consider the circumstances. (Especially, as the real spammers will probably never read it, anyways.)
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I’ll review it, thank you for the suggestion!
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