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Added community flagging to filter out SPAM and abusive comments
3 comments. Current rating: 
(1 votes). Leave comments and/ or rate it.
There have been some postings asking for moderation:
"I know I breached this, but, perhaps, it will get the much needed attention of ANY moderator and delete these messages."
Spam and abusive comments have been a problem. The site gets quite a few comments every day and I have tried to automate the process of recognizing spam. I have compiled a list of 'bad urls' and also 'bad IP numbers' over the past 12 months. As of today (December 2006), about 30-40 such spam comments are posted daily. They typically advertise online pharmacies and so on.
However, it has been more difficult to find abusive comments. The use of the word 'idiot' alone is not necessarily abusive.
I have added today a button 'Spam' next to each comment which readers can press. If a message gets voted to be spam 3 times, it will be hidden from the public.
I will review the message then manually and either delete it or override the 'community voting'.
I think this process will evolve over time; maybe 3 votes is a too low or too high threshold. We will see..
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The community flagging system has just started and I wanted to see what was getting flagged. A couple of articles were marked as 'spam' but I could not find any problems with them. So I looked at the IP numbers of the people who did flag comments as 'spam'.
See the table below. It shows the IP numbers of people who clicked the 'SPAM' button and it sorts them by the number of clicks. The first IP number is 85.17.3.163. I tried www.ip2location.com and it says that this IP is in the Netherlands. However, I did not quite believe that. I typed this IP number into Google:  http://www.google.c...17.3.163
Why am I not surprised that result page #1 is a web page in Russian language? :-) On to the next busiest flagging user: 41.204.37.195 This IP number resolves to GHANA TELECOM ADSL DYNAMIC ADDRESS POOL Again, why am I not surprised about this?  Keywords: russians and nigerians on this site | ||
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SPAM button also can help protect newbies. Basically when you spot an unwelcome post, indicate thread name, page number, date and time stamp, and request SPAM hit.
Scammers try different tactics. Some upload trojans with JPEGs, these are hard to detect, we will leave it for experts like Klaus to report them to the Admin. They try inserting URLs. These need to be handled with care, and should not be opened by clicking, instead, here is what we do, as in this example. Check this page http://www.delphifa..#comments
First of all, Droog from Russian Federation is our friend, scroll down to the first SPAM like message. The so-called France starts with a suspicious URL, and search the address www.fuel.tv* on the top left of this page (I will discuss the * in a different article) In this case only one hit, and request a SPAM hit on (all such) hits. There are more articles by the same guy, forging IP in several countries. While searching, start after the double //, stop at the double .., then add a final *, and search at the top left. The next search will be for www.jacksonv* etc. By getting rid of suspicious URLs, etc., we save newbies from accidentally clicking on them, and messing up their computers. | ||
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In the earliest database systems, efficiency was perhaps the primary concern, but it was already recognized that there were other important objectives. One of the key aims was to make the data independent of the logic of application programs, so that the same data could be made available to different applications. Thanks.
Regards, http://www.fivebuttons.com/
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