I know what the'll be discussing at the next staff meeting...
Are those bugs, or has the spammers' scripts just failed in a hilarious fashion? The first example has "ttp//" simply has just written for the subdomain, something Hubski probably wouldn't (and shouldn't) be filtering out. The second post has %20 at the start, denoting the url was submitted with a space in the front of it. This is something that Hubski can definitely filter out as it may affect legit posters too, just call a trim() function on any url submitted.
I'm really curious as to how hubski is choosing to deal with automated posting. It would be a really fun machine learning project to determine if uploads were done by an actual human or a bot. The hard part would be to getting the bot's programmer to think that everything is kosher while you silently associate a filter to their stuff (I think thats what #spam is doing?) to allow users the choice of whether or not to see it. I'd personally have a great time at attempting to write a bot to test your simulated Hubski-Turing test.
I think it would be nice if you couldn't post a link until you filled up a percentage of your hubwheel. It would make it so that only people genuinely interested in being part of the community would post things. I think it'd kill spammers overnight.
I like the idea but I wouldn't want it to be too locked up. Like, maybe just a single dot of the hubwheel. I don't know how the formula for that works anyways. Paging hubski experts: kleinbl00, thenewgreen, insomniasexx, steve, et. al.
hubski So here's the thing about spam. There's no point to it unless it's deeply automated. Most spamming is accomplished through Hootsuite or similar - basically a giant spamming dashboard with plugins that allow you to pummel whatever social media network you wish to pummel. Hubski benefits through obscurity - there are no networks that have a Hubski plugin, in no small part because Hubski has no API. This will change eventually - Hubski will be a target-rich environment enough to bother with and it will be more than the dead-enders running their own kludging. At that point it becomes pretty easy to get rid of all but the most dedicated spammers - your "single dot of the hubwheel" would accomplish a lot. r/realestate gets about 15 spam posts an hour, all of which are solved simply by setting automoderator to punt any account with less than two comment karma. Lately it generates a lot of false positives but that's because Reddit operates via shadowbanning - a message that says "you can't post until you've gotten at least one share from another IP" would solve the lack of moderation. It would lead to a script that creates two accounts that vote for each other, but at this point we're at hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems.
Indeed. However I get the feeling that most of our spam is fact human-driven, probably because it is still obscure. Also, with "you can't post until you've gotten at least one share from another IP" how would one get a share if they can't post? Do you mean a comment circledot/updot/upvote/whatever you want to call it?
You're absolutely right, I was thinking in terms of the colon being important to show it's intended to be the protocol not a subdomain -- completely forgetting that forward-slashes are not a valid subdomain character! So yes, Hubski can easily filter both of these invalid urls (and fix them -- though it would be best not to do so automatically but ask the user, that would help against scripts).