Both of these feeds have been essentially useless the past two days due to a stream of bots posting endless, lengthy spam posts. I tagged several dozen as spam yesterday but that's a rather time consuming method of cleaning up global and has no effect on chatter. If this is to be a community or self-moderated site, how can we improve the tools available without giving trolls too much ability to interfere with beneficial content.
This is a response to like..everything in this thread. I do not like 24 hour rule. I know I first created my account on Reddit, Hubski, and others because I finally found a discussion I could add value to. Forums that have a manual review process....well....even the ones I have signed up for I never used. By the time I get approved, I'm doing something else. The barrier to entry for using Hubski is already surprisingly high. New users consistently describe Hubski as "clique-y" and not the most friendly place for newcomers. By preventing users from commenting for 24 hours, we will see a significant drop off after users create an account. I don't have stats on this so imagine: 10% of people who visit Hubski, ever consider making an account. Of the 10% who consider making an account, only 10% of those actually make the account and comment or post. Of those 10% who actually comment or post, only 10% come back again the next day and make another post or comment. So with these imaginary numbers, .1% of new people who visit Hubski will ever comment or post twice. By implementing a 24 hour rule, we may see that .1% drop to .01% or even .001%. It's not that new users won't create the account. It is that the new users who do create an account will never post or comment. If you think I'm being ridiculous with those numbers, I'm not. Conventional wisdom says that a good conversion rate is somewhere around 2% to 5%. In fact, having a conversion rate above 10% is basically unheard of, and places you with the unicorns and other fantasy animals the internet world uses to describe amazingness. So....how do we prevent spam without causing a massive drop off in legitimate users? You do something that is very easy for a normal human being to do but impossible for a bot to do and tedious for a spammer. Originally, they figured Captchas were the way to go but unfortunately.....they don't really stop anything beyond basic bots. Bots are reading Captchas today. Or... you let spammers be spammers and let everyone else call them spammers. Right now, in order for a new user, even a spammer, to be flagged as spam, multiple people must do the following things: 1. Go to global. 2. See spam. 3. Click the user's name. 4. Scroll down, find the little check boxes, and click filter or block. 5. Repeat. I propose we do it differently. Put that filter button on the global fucking feed. If the user is under 24 hours old and they get 2 filters, they're automatically globally filtered. They want to not be globally filtered? Then send us a message and we'll look into your shit. This does a bunch of things: 1. No additional barrier to entry for new users. 2. No need for the Hubski team to be moderating and deleting spam -- we only have to deal with false positives. Additionally, putting a limit on the number of posts/comments a new user can make in a set amount of time will decrease the amount of spam. But, admittedly, it will make it harder to tell if it's spam, self-promotion, or just really bad content and it may drive spammers to simply make new accounts. (This is actually quite funny: most spam accounts limit themselves to 2-3 posts and then they're gone. We have no mechanism for this but they do it anyways)
On reddit, if you don't have enough Karma, you need to complete a reCaptcha to comment/post. Would something similar be possible here? I doubt people are willing to put much effort into spamming Hubski, so you probably wouldn't need a very hard human verification. I imagine messages like "What is 7 plus the amount of seconds in a minute?" would be easy to generate and easy to answer.
I'm fearful the continued use of the new rule will mean that people who have been lurking without an account will only be pressured to create one by wanting to get involved in discussion. If they then have to wait a day to actually get involved, new voices may miss a chance to 've heard on topics they actually care about. If I found a site where there was no real benefit to joining for a day, I'd be more likely to look elsewhere. Lurk more is a good principle, but I think it is one best encouraged through suggestions rather than set rules.
All, We are keenly aware of this. It's uber annoying to us as we essentially are manually deleting and globally filtering these accounts. We have some ideas for fixes, but honestly I think that kleinbl00 has a good temporary solution that he mentions below.
In continuing the "personal moderation" spirit of Hubski, might I suggest methods to simplify and encourage spam detection and elimination? 1) Give me a "spam" toggle somewhere easy. I'd really only need it in global. When I hit that toggle, I want to see checkboxes next to every global post. Better yet, give me a box next to the user and another next to the domain. I'll go through and hit checkboxes then (commit changes - UX question for the team). Every domain I spam is filtered for me, every user I spam is filtered for me. 2) Give users a "spam tolerance." If I say zero, everything that's been called spam by even one person goes away for me. If I say ten (or five, or whatever max you want), the only thing that gets spammed is mine. In between, something something rob05c magic. 3) Incentivize spam-busting. Give me a badge for every five or ten spammers I hit that, say, three other people hit. Or five other people. If only a couple people are patrolling, nobody gets badges. If lots of people are patrolling... hmm. Give it to the first person or something. Badge inflation is real. Spitballing.
So to go off what you're working with here, something like what you're proposing would have a somewhat significant risk for abuse. Another site I used to go to had a similar system for reporting abuse. Basically it was a three strike rule doubled over. It actually worked really well, especially since the strikes were anonymous. The way it worked was as so . . . User 1 posts or comments something objectionable. If three users striked it as such, user 1 gets a strike. Three strikes in a 24 hour period and they couldn't post anything for 48 hours. However, let's say user 2 strikes user 1 even though user 1 didn't post anything objectionable. If three other users unstrike user 1, user 2 gets a strike. Once again, if it happens three times in a 24 hour period, user 2 gets a time out. Even though the system was anonymous, it worked quite well and was fairly balance. I never saw it abused. At the same time, people were very careful how they spent their strikes, for fear of getting timed out themselves. As a result, it was pretty much never used during heated debates, only really when people posted NSFW content, personal info, etc. I could see something like this working well for spam.Spitballing.
I like it. One of my cousin's friends came up with a "genius" system for traffic enforcement - every licensed driver gets an official DOT paintball gun and three official DOT paintballs PER MONTH. Anybody who acts like an asshole in traffic gets shot with paintballs. Cops to pull over and ticket anyone with more than, say, five hits on their car. Aside from the fact that it encourages drivers to shoot at each other (among other dire problems), the limited quantity of paintballs would cause drivers to take their shots seriously (assuming the paintballs couldn't be easily counterfeited, at which point it starts to sound like the Joker's fever dream). So - limit your available strikes and have them replenished by the system in response to legit hits.
While I love the "tag the asshole system" probably best to do it electronically / metaphorically - the idea of giving drivers paintballs horrifies me. I went to a game once where several people were hospitalized when someone swapped his paintballs out for marbles.
I used to a lot! My friends out here aren't into it, I'd be game for playing again though. I mostly used to do scenarios, Oklahoma and Skirmish dday. Doesn't seem like a lot of that out here. But I would love to see a hello kitty themed Tippman, I didn't know that was on my bucket list until this moment. My last Tippman was a 98 custom :)
http://imgur.com/labgoww That's the kind of shit I'm talking about.
The thing is though, this would affect the experience for non-subscribed users that might be checking this site out for the first time. They go to global, see it's a giant can of spam, and never come back.Right. Filter users newer than 2 days in your preferences. Problem solved.
Holy moly. I have never seen anything like that. I am not even that sophisticated.