67 New Spam Topics overnight

I was marking these as spam as they popped up last night and saw them getting removed but apparently the spammers continued after we went to sleep. BEGON FORUM POLLUTION.

Retool who did you anger? Why are they doing this to you?

1 Like

Hey @BattleCattleDevelopment! Thanks so much for the help!! You and @jg80 caught a bunch of them. I'm working on upping our automated filtering of spam, but as you noticed we aren't quite able to keep up just yet. I believe I've cast them out out into the abyss as of this moment. But even as I post this the auto filtering is catching more. I'll remain ever vigilant, and with your help we shall keep the Forum pollution free!

2 Likes

Keep fighting the good fight, @joeBumbaca!

4 Likes

Possible to add (even just until flood passes) a kind of 'quick flag' icon/button everywhere there is an actual link to these posts? Like the "suggested topics" below this. 3 of 5 any user could just:
-click
-click
-click

And not just report but auto update a filter and flag/report that post as being part of a specific issue being currently dealt with (i.e. today it is spam but tomorrow the button may be fighting the overbearing AI overlords...).

IDK anything about any of this and no one pays me to mind their business. I can't figure out how to get paid for minding my own... But all of the above just came to mind as fairly quick, easy and useful if it could be done.

Don't know how to edit... but that was me asking if that is possible to add as a feature in community boards... (here, assuming you mean all those posts I see in the suggested topics below.)

Thank you all for the support and solidarity in the good fight against spam! We've been following some of this guidance and updating "watched words" and phrases like "toll free number" that trigger auto-flagging to auto-silence the user and unlist the post. The good news is we've seen the spam volume significantly subside recently based on some of these updates.

@indefiniteness we'll look into whether there's a good way to add another way to flag spam content :thinking: We use Discourse to host our forum. They do tend to have flexible settings and plugins we sometimes add to bolster default functionality. The best way to flag spam is to use the flag button under a comment:
Screen Shot 2024-04-03 at 4.47.53 PM

However, users need to reach trust level 1: basic user" to access the flag button. Same with editing posts at the moment. We updated the ability to edit posts to trust level 1 instead of trust level 0 yesterday because spammers were using post editing to get around our watched words. We'll track whether we see more reason to restore access to that feature to level 0 in the future, vs. spammers leveraging it to get through. It's a careful balance we want to strike - making sure we're protected against spam, but not overly hindering other users' experience in parallel.

Thank you again for your patience and collaboration on this this week!

2 Likes