@DᴀʀᴛʜVᴀᴅᴇʀ thanks for getting back to me. I'm asking because I see spam being posted at roughly the same time at your site and Apple's and the Apple spam is removed faster. My thinking is that you probably simply have fewer users, but I'm not sure. Reducing the amount of time that obvious spam is visible to users who don't know what they can do about it seems to me like an objective and good goal, no?
you are right that Charcoal is completely a volunteer effort with no official role within Stack Exchange
and I'm just a random volunteer looking for a way to improve the overall experience
spam on GD, like on the majority of the other SE sites which have spam in the first place, is completely dominated by a single operator apparently from India whose spam is rather formulaic and easy to identify so it's not particularly "subjective", it's just that SE's own spam prevention mechanisms are primarily IP-based and this operation has apparently found a loophole, though that's pure speculation; we don't see their IP addresses
going from minutes to seconds probably doesn't matter, I'm more worried about the occasional hours or days if something is missed because nobody was around
@Ryan thanks. I don't have numbers yet but I received a database dump and intend to look into it to see if my subjective impression is based on significant real differences
@Ryan that's quite possible of course, someone in Charcoal is looking into that too (though I don't think we got GD in the dump ... do you have access to deleted spam conveniently?)
if there is a significant amount of spam which Smoke Detector is currently missing, that would be interesting and possibly important to know about, but I'm guessing there really isn't
if it's not too much trouble, reporting spam to Metasmoke when you clean it up would help ensure that we know about it, if only because it's likely that the same spammer is also targeting other sites in the Stack Exchange network. We have some handy user scripts which make this by and large transparent if you're interested in looking into that
@tripleee I don't know what ya'll know but to give some idea as I suspect our regulars don't know how much us mods do. Here's how many users we've destroyed in the last two months:
I can't see why they destroyed. I know 100% of the users I've destroyed are due to spam with the occasional being for signing up just to post rude / random nonsense.
Darth destroyed accounts on: Mar 25, 18, 17, 10, 8, 8, 5, 1 --- Feb 27, 26, 12, 9, 9, 8, 7, 5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 4. That's just for March and February
Vincent destroyed accounts on: Mar 21, 7, 1 --- Feb 27, 24, 20, 16, 13, 6, 3, 2, 1, 1. There's March and February
I've destroyed accounts on: Mar 24, 23, 22, 22, 22, 6 --- Feb 27, 26, 26, 26, 26, 8, 1. There's my March and February
if you cross reference and see any of those dates missing than it means you don't have all of the information
as for your scripts and whatnot. You'd have to ask Darth, Vincent, and JohnB. I'm not a scripting guy and wouldn't touch it
well like I said last time someone from smoke came in here --- we don't know how much spam we really get because you all do this which is cool but don't tell us about it.
Until someone came in here to complain to us about I don't know--- a year ago maybe? None of us had ever heard of your project
if you want to go post a meta on our meta than that's up to you
But from what I see the ones on your erway thing all still exist just flagged as spam which tells me a moderator didn't see it
so you guys are downvoting and flagging it to be destroyed while us moderators are trained to destroy users that are created to only post nonsense/spam
I can still see all of yours while the ones us moderators catch are actually destroyed and removed
would it help if we created a separate chat room for Smoke Detector notices for GD? that way they are available if you want them but we don't disrupt this room
@Ryan @tripleee Afaik, a spam flag does pop up in the Mod flag queue. At least I know I have seen lots, and have re-flagged posts to have them removed because of those flags.
To be very honest? If destroying all users for all spam posts--deleted or not--would become a part of the mod job description, I'd be hard pressed to quit.
With all due respect, but I hardly find the time to do my regular mod duties properly these days. As far as I can see from the front, spam is handled nicely by processes that do not require mod intervention, or only rarely.
I'll set up the bot notices in the meantime, it's easy to revert if nobody wants it and it might actually be useful to have some test data there just to see how it appears
@Vincent definitely a meta post.. I don't see any reason not to have the room though? I mean, people can just ignore it if they're not interested... right?
Hi, Charcoal admin here. @Cai and @Vincent - just to confirm, you don't have any issues with us posting reports to the new room that tripleee created? I'd just like to make sure you're happy with that before I merge and deploy the pull request.
@Vincent It would never become part of the job description I reckon, but it always will be a good thing to do. Shrug The biggest portion of what mods and normal users do on the sites is not what they should/must be doing, but what's good to do
@Ryan Oh, no no . . . It wasn't a reply, but a ping
Which means it wasn't directed at any special message
You said, if I understand correctly, that autoflagging might be harmful because you don't get to destroy the user
TL;DR: We did it, so... yes.
What is this?
Charcoal is the organization behind the SmokeDetector bot and other nice things. This bot scans new posts across the entire network for spam posts and reports them to various chatrooms where people can act on them. If a post has been created or edite...
@Ryan not seen any recently but one of the problems is visibility, they tend to scroll off everybody's screen and forgotten
my question here is mainly, did you miss these because we deleted them, and what would be a better process in that case
but if we can set up pings in the other room I created, that would allow us to just check it out for a while and see if it improves the situation for anyone
>What should I do with spam and purely disruptive users?
Stack Exchange sites have very high signal-to-noise ratios because, in part, spam has a half life measured in minutes. On large sites, crowdsourced spam flags remove problem posts before a moderator even needs to be involved. When you do see a spam flag, remember that your actions take immediate effect and produce dire consequences for the target user. Be sure your are looking at actual spam and not just a user confused about the purposes of the site.
>For every spam handled by a human, you can expect 10 times as much was handled by the system automatically. The cost is an occasional false positive. (If you see one, please let us know. We are always adjusting parameters to improve the system.)
Problem users
The other use case for our spam protection system is to block people who jump from one account to another to post nonsense. Usually such trolls have an account that has already been suspended and need to find other ways to make trouble. Typically moderators delete these accounts as "no longer welcome to participate". In the past, ne…
@Ryan Well, we occasionally erroneously catch stuff that aren't spam, and thus feedback them with "FP-", telling Smokey they're not spam. SE can't set the bar as high as us, because that would mean the person wouldn't be able to post their question, and there would be considerable headache on metas . . .
as in, our spam flags, which is basically the community's, although we are a significant factor within that community as far as flagging spam is concerned
@Ryan Well TBH, they did communicate with SE and gave Smokey an exception, providing it with 20000 API requests instead of 10000, but implementing it SE-wide hasn't happened yet because "meh"
Smokey already helps destroy most spam within 30 seconds, and there's hardly any room left to improve.
So I guess that time can be spent making documentation on SO better/worse
IOW, leaving well enough alone as long as it doesn't wreck havoc
I don't see that as a reason not to flag spam though... it comes down to leaving all spam to be handled by mods or mods having to manually check through deleted posts and destroying users... neither of which is ideal but leaving spam around for longer doesn't sound like the best option
alright back. In my office though so will be between screens and work and such now
Now to get this settled once and for all hopefully I'm going to speak pretty bluntly here. @M.A.R. your people skills need improvement. I was having a nice conversation with @tripleee but you came in here making all sorts of weird assumptions. Even Tripleee could tell and suggested you back off.
More to the point though, this time -- AND -- last time we told you all we don't know about this and you didn't listen to us
Now I've supplied you with a screenshot and you still weren't satisfied until talking to another, less experienced, user in a different community.
So again, you all are doing good work but you need to do a better job communicating with people outside of your chat and primarily communicating with SE staff. As long as you don't have diamonds and don't ask the right questions you're not getting an accurate picture.
We have no problems with you or your project, we do have a problem with you making assumptions about things even when we try to tell you what really goes on and you still don't believe us
talking about us in your chatroom isn't going to win any of us over either
appreciate any feedback on whether we can go ahead with the Spam Blot room, it should be harmless even if you don't particularly like it, and of course we can remove it again once we have tried it out if you don't like it
I dont understand what the guys from smoke detector do not understand so I'll be blunt since it's been said several times. Any action should be posted on meta.graphicdesign for the COMMUNITY to know, understand and discuss. Already I've read smoke detector taking action after we've stated what the course of action be. Again, please post on meta.
@angussidney before this action occurs take this discussion to our meta so the community will know what is going on and be able to converse on any action.
@Cai if you've made one please let me know and I'll edit it for a feature
@Ryan well just reading the above it seems to halt. Personally if this is their initiative they should create the meta so it kills two birds with one stone 1) an education on what it does 2) how it would help the community
2. that moderators can see their flags. They definitely see now that isn't the case, but it sure was hard getting that through to them
of course they're initial reason for coming in here was to say we're slow and take too long to remove spam when I see no evidence of that in their system
and their own comment among themselves said "which is hard considering the 20-second delection of most GD.SE spam"
so I don't know what the deal is. 20 seconds sounds pretty darn fast to me
but I know I feel like they think we're the incompetent ones when based on what I'm seeing we've been moderators longer than many of them have even been members :\
@Ryan is it bad that I want to get one of those network coffee makers just so I can script against it.. Coding, all of a sudden I want a cup of coffee double click my app to tell the coffee maker go make me coffee.. lol
I've just begun using Macromedia FreeHand (version before it became Adobe Freehand) that we had laying around. And I want to do this same thing--namely, invert a shadow.
In FreeHand there are two effects called "Bevel" and "Emboss". They both are pretty similar to each other. But, I can't seem t...
Hey could you guys design a few stencil shapes id like to test making a stencil out of say 1.5-3 mm acrylic and possibly ship to a select few of you if i can get this working.
Well usually when you cut accryllic you generate some scrap, that varies, typically something like 60 cm by a 200 can be easily accommodated in most sheets.
But i would like this to be a collaboration.
As such the cost for me is mostly either nothing + shopping or something very tiny for the acrylic.
The laser itself is free, as its supplied by my workplace
@Ryan I'm new to this forum, but very long in the tooth when it comes to being a user of graphics software. My career began in the print industry, when there were no computers.
nice! we get a good number of Gimp questions and don't have many regulars that use it so you might be able to help a lot of people if you stick around
my mom actually started as a graphic designer in the print industry before computers too. she didn't stay in the field though at all and it was long before I was born
I just try to remember Ive been doing this for 20 years and some of these people may be in the first year or even first week using it and dont know how to even ask
were you on any of the old school websites? Were-Here? Flashkit?
@BillyKerr this is how I often feel. Luckily I've gotten good at playing nice... and rant to friends in Slack instead of actually telling off my "assistant" (its complicated)
@Ryan I think its a bit up to what kind of sizes of scrap i have. But basically usually you have slivers that are rather long in one direction but not very thick
so maybe 10-15 cm high but width can be much more than that
@joojaa built a coffee table once out of plexiglass, the legs were 3x3 and the sides for it were 1/2" thick and the top was like 3/4" thick. Molded and everything since I had access to an oven