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Welcoming new authors 💖 and fighting spam 🗑️ on DEV

Gabor Szabo on January 11, 2023

A while ago I volunteered to moderate one, later a few more tags here at DEV. For some reason the admins of the site also gave me some extra rights...
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Stan Kukučka

@szabgab great tool. What about DEV spam that follows each of us (our profile) time to time?

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Gabor Szabo • Edited

I am not sure what you mean. I noticed one account that keeps up-voting my articles that I think does this only so I visit their profile where they promote some event. Otherwise I have not noticed and regular strange behavior. If you meant something else, would you care to explain further?

In any case I think the only thing I can do on that extra interface is to report articles.

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Stan Kukučka

@szabgab i have noticed i recieve notification quite frequent, where some strange accounts follows me back. In term stragne DEV.to accounts i mean accounts that have zero informations on profile and don't even publish articles.

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Gabor Szabo

Hmm, are these new accounts? When someone signs up these days they are offered a list of people to follow. They might follow you that way and because they are new their account is empty. I wonder is this is what you see.

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Stan Kukučka

@szabgab yes. This sounds legit to this topic. There are some accounts that are quite long time here, but still with zero informations or with strange informations provided. But let's just ignore it.

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Vincent A. Cicirello

Some people may not want to list any information publicly. Even if they have no activity listed they could still be valid. E.g. someone that reads posts without commenting.

Also if you do find a spam user such as someone that spams in comments, you can report the comment as spam, and even the user more generally.

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Michael Tharrington

First off, it's been so awesome having your help fighting spam, Gabor!

We've noticed all the reports coming in from ya and it's really been helping us to clear out spam.

This tool ya came up with sounds awesome! Both @ben and @peter have been developing similar tools for recognizing spam and I'm sure they'll be interested in seeing your methods here.

I also love that you've created a section for welcoming new folks. It's so cool to give encouragement to those first time authors out there! So appreciate ya sharing the love like this!

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Brian Kirkpatrick

Honestly, the spam seems less bothersome and less prevalent than the clickbait and clickbait-adjacent content. "I reduced the lines of CSS in my project by 50%--CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW!" "This one simple trick and you will NEVER USE HTML AGAIN!" etc.

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J3ffJessie

As a moderator I do my best to limit these post types from being visible on the timeline as best as I can. Only so many hours in the day though. It is a top focus for myself to try and ensure that the content you are served to the timeline is quality content and not the click bait type that you mentioned. Just wanted you to know it doesn’t go unnoticed and it’s definitely something we pay attention to but it’s hard to get them all.

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Liu Yongliang • Edited

That's really cool! Both as a way to highlight spam posts and welcome new writers.

If I may suggest, perhaps have another page that's more filtered down to potential scam posts (or a filter in the current page)? This way the posts that are potentially scam will have more visibility to "reviewers". At the moment I am seeing innocuous recent posts that are not spam, which kind of defeat the purpose a little bit as I can read those recent posts on Dev.to itself.

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Gabor Szabo

Good idea. I opened an issue for myself

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Ansh Saini

This is awesome!

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Thomas Bnt ☕

Awesome ! 🤩💪🏼

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CitronBrick

Can someone please teach me (or provide a resource) how to create a series in dev.to ?

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Gabor Szabo

When you edit a post in the top right corner there is a link called "Jekyll front matter". That's where you have the explanation.

In a nutshell: go to each article you'd want to be part of a series called 'foobar' and add to the header (front matter) the following line:

series: foobar
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CitronBrick

Meant to ask this question in dev.to/derlin/series-vs-single-whi....

But you still replied!
You are an awesome person !!