Twine Q&A - more flags possible?

Question

Hello,

I would like 'to flag down' all spam mails here, but from time to time I get 'too many posts flagged - please try again in an hour ' and further flagging is denied.

I've already read, that I should not vote down the spam mail account, so I do this no more.
And I only flag spam mails.

Is there a possibility to configure 'more flags'?

Or is there another preferred way I could go to put the spam out of the way?

Kind regards,

Jherek

Answer 1

Yeah, it's annoying.

I used the "Send Feedback" link on the lower left to suggest using some anti-spam tools for Question2Answer but I don't know if anybody has seen it.

I've been flagging as much of the spam as I can so it gets to the two flags threshold that hides it, but there's still way too much spam.

If they could even just automatically moderate posts with "http" in the subject line (or something like that), that would stop 80% of the spam.

Comments

The goal of the spam is to appeal to web crawlers to increase search traffic, it seems, meaning getting links on pages that point to their garbage websites. The title of the post isn't as important as the body in that regard, since the title won't ever be a link, and changing that isn't going to be a big deal for most of the spammers.

I think a point limit that prevents new users from posting links in questions would probably limit the spam to comments / answers, but that could obviously hurt new users a bit and might not even be possible.

Its definitely super annoying and frustrating though, my heart sinks when I log in and see the Q&A gummed up with spam.

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My point was that it was a simple way to recognize the spam, and thus keep their spam out of here entirely.  And if you warn users to avoid putting links in the subject line, then it doesn't stop new users at all.  Any question can be asked without that.

That said, adding the anti-spam stuff I linked to (and possibly updating Q2A as well) should definitely help.

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I would guess, that 20% of those have http in den Question, not 80%.

What I discovered minutes ago: First I got the well known 'too many flags .... in an hour'  but a few minutes later I was able to set flags again.

For me that works: flagging the posts and if a post has got 2 flags by different persons, it vanishes.

Thanks for the comments.

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Yeah, the flag limit is per hour of the day.  So if you hit your flag limit at 4:59pm, then just wait a minute or two and you'll be able to flag more posts again.

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Thank you very much, HiEv, for posting this detail!!

It's 12:52 now - I will immediately start flagging :-)  (und might finish the mission ten minutes later :-) )

Thanks alot

Answer 2

Spam questions are hidden by users with the ability to do so.  Flagging them does not affect them in any meaningful way.

Comments

A question with two flags gets auto-hidden, even without any interaction from specially privileged users. It's in the admin settings, as Admin >Spam >Automatically hide posts which reach: N flags.

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@Akjosch: Yes, I do add flags as often as I look into Q+A and they hide, if I'm the one  setting the 2nd flag. No problem at all.

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@Akjosch: Yes, I do add flags as often as I look into Q+A and they hide, if I'm the one  setting the 2nd flag. No problem at all. But if there are more than ... say 5 or so ... I'm not able to 'flag down' them all.  I hoped, there is a configuration which 'allowed number of flags set within 1 hour' or so.

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I don't think increasing the allowed flags is a good solution since they're probably restricted to prevent abuse.  People shouldn't need to be flagging spam that much anyway; the spam detection ought to be better on the server side.  It's not like the spam isn't readily identifiable, and people have implied that the tools exist and merely aren't installed here.