Hey folks! 👋
I wanted to write up a quick post about spam fighting in this community as it's a never ending battle, it negatively affects the expe...
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I run a self-hosted Forem and have faced challenges. I am looking for a reputation-based system. Ideally, users would start with roles like read-only or comment-only, and earn the ability to publish as they gain a reputation or enough age (let's say 30 days, should be configurable). While it might not fit dev.to, it could be beneficial for hosted Forems.
@michaeltharrington Thanks for the insights. Is the rel="ugc" parameter to urls something universal that search engine crawlers understand themselves? I've not run into this before, but it sounds like a neat idea (until spammers find ways to override it eventually).
Thanks for what you all at Dev do to keep our conversations clean of the "spammy spamminess" (<- loved this!).
rel=ugcis a universal attribute value invented by Google. It works similar torel=nofollow. Moz.com has a good blog post on that aspect of search engine marketing and trying to prevent spammers misusing our own marketing and development effort: How Google's Rel = Nofollow, Sponsored, & UGC Links Impact SEOThanks for the read, Ingo!
I see @ingosteinke already followed up with a great answer below. I love the Mozilla resources. Thanks Ingo! 🙌
And Jan, I'm glad ya dig the "spammy spamminess" line. 😁 The fight against spammers is both ridiculous and frustrating... I try to find the humor in it so as not too just seethe with rage all day. 😂🤬
I've seen sophisticated occurrences these days on DEV with very long comments that look legitimate if you don't read carefully.
The trick used by spammers is to use very long comments (I mean very very long) with generic TECH references, and suddenly, you get their crappy link.
Be careful.
YES, I've definitely seen that @jmau111! This pattern is particularly annoying.
They're trying to stealthily sneak in those links by making it seem like they're talking about tech.
If this becomes the new norm, then I think we might have to make some adjustments to flag any comments with links in them for review by admin or moderators.
For now, if you run into this sort of behavior, please don't hesitate to report it to us!
Indeed. I've reported it multiple times. I doubt any algorithm could catch such attacks efficiently in the long term, as they renew the text and the links on a regular basis, so, yes, manual report and moderation.
Ya rock! 🙌
Really appreciate ya taking the time to help report these folks. 😁
mostly bots I think, but no problem.
Haha, good point! 🤖
I've seen more spam on other sites than I have on dev.to --- so the system must be working. But we are all so on-guard ( as we should be ) for trash links that anything unusual becomes suspect. I've run into that myself and do not have a good idea how to deal with it.
Woot! That's great to hear Frank. 🙌
It's a constant game of adjusting things... spammers find an opening, we gotta plug it, and the process restarts. Kinda like this cat here 👇 but hopefully we're a bit more effective. 😅
And definitely good to keep on-guard for those trash links! They are out there!
Hello Michael Tharrington,
thank you to you and the development team for fighting spammers.
I like dev.to very much and see it as a place to communicate with different personalities from all over the world and to read their shared thoughts and knowledge.
Fighting spam is a great way to keep this a great place :D!
Thanks Akin! That means a whole heckuva lot. 😀
I gotta say, a few months ago I received a wave of spam comments in one specific post of mine and I never knew why. But now I don't receive any... I hope it's because the spam detection is working better! :D
Heck yeah! Thanks a bunch Miguel.
I really do think our spam fighting game is improving. It's good to hear from your personal experience that things are looking less spammy too!
🛡🛡🛡 We protect ourselves as best we can against spam 🛡🛡🛡
Thomas, you are big part of that "we" ... I can't say thank you enough for all the help you've given us over the years in the fight against spam. Really appreciate ya being in the mod crew! 🙏🙏🙏
It's cool that URLs in users profiles are now marked as User Generated Content, but spammers can still put them in comments and posts. That's the main place I see spam when I visit.
Has marking these as UGC until a level of trustworthiness has been met been considered?
i.e. Users reach a minimum level of trust by having 3 high quality posts/comments and having 30 days pass since the first one was made before their content stops being marked as UGC
This was great info to know! I have been noting spam comments on my personal articles and I couldn't understand the motive behind them as they seemed very obviously spam.
I will make sure to be more proactive in reporting and hope to help in whatever capacity I can!
Really enjoy being a part of this community and will do my best to keep bad actors out!
Thanks again for the insight! 😁
I'm really glad ya found the info here helpful, Bradston!
I do think it's important for us to know the motivation so we can better fight against it. Understanding that it's a game of backlinking for SEO purposes really helped us to combat that particular goal of spammers — i.e. if we can make their links useless to them, then they won't gain anything from coming here, thus hopefully they'll stop coming here. 🤞
Anywho, I so appreciate your message and willingness to help keep the spammers out. Don't hesitate to report spammers as ya see'em and we'll do our best to take'em out quickly as we can! 🙌
The troll in me wants to report this post as spam. Nicely done, though!
Hahaha! As one of the primary peoples reviewing reports, I would def appreciate that. 😁
By the way, big ups to @caroline who really is the primary person reviewing reports nowadays. Caroline, if you see Matt pulling any shenanigans like this, a stern email response is appropriate. 😂
We can automate the process to remove spam posts.
Great Initiative 🛡
Woot! I think so too, Krishna. Of course, we gotta be kinda careful with automation because we might get some false positives, but I think it's well worth it if it keeps the spam out. Glad ya dig the initiative!
Yes, True
There are always some false results,
but we can definitely work upon it.
In opinion there should be sub section where you can create your post and give only one link. In that these guys would be restricted to only one place other wise they will spam whole forum with there links. One more thing i have read that google tell them not create backlinks but why these guys are creating backlinks i really don't understand this.
Spam is such a nuisance lets all do our part to get rid of it 💪
Appreciate your comment, Andrew! Teamwork all the way. 🙌
This is sooooooo educational
Fun fact, I reported various account and post since I joined dev.to last week.
This morning I checked if you were using rel=no follow and I found you were using ugc, a tag I didn't know. So I googled it.
And now I find your post by sorting by top.
One question and few suggestions
What is a tag mod ? Does it mean once reported post are automatically removed ? Or is it about joining the team that moderate ?
Here I have few suggestions, did you consider using rules like these ones ?
Assuming that nofollow is more interesting for fighting spam than ugc