On a possibly related note to refreshing the page, I'm seeing this and this in different tabs. (There's different dates on both). On refreshing I'm only seeing the apr 29th one. What's up with that?
@SmokeDetector mildly suspicious, seems promotional, suggests another tool instead of directly answering the question...however, it also addresses the other answer's use of scripts, it's free, and no evidence of affiliation or other sketchy posts in MS, so...FP pending any other evidence that it's not
@SmokeDetector Old spam. Was edited in, edited out by a >2k user, then edited back in by the OP. Throwing up a mod flag purely due to age, but a spam flag would probably also be fine.
Oddly enough, I was browsing the transcript and ended up back here, during which I saw that there was one last hit on that site. At the time, there were upwards of 20 network-wide.
@10Rep That pattern looks like it's already caught by Potentially bad keyword in body and Potentially bad keyword in answer; append -force if you really want to do that.
> Link at end of answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer ---------- Link at end of answer - Position 25-113: <a href="https://makemytables.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MakeMyTables.com</a> !</p> Potentially bad keyword in answer - Position 42-58: makemytables.com, Position 87-103: MakeMyTables.com Potentially bad ns for domain in answer - makemytables.com NS suspicious ns70.domaincontrol.com.,ns69.domaincontrol.com.
I believe it only protects you from experimental reasons catching your post. Anything non-experimental (being a blacklisted user, posting a bad keyword/blacklisted website) will still report it here.
There is a rep limit? I agree that high rep should make it less likely to be spam, but it shouldn't completely eliminate your post from being picked up.
@Nick Yes, with like...5 asterisks. You can still be blacklisted as a user, and the rep required for different rules varies. But for instance, my SO rep excludes me from every rule except actually blacklisting my user ID.
But also, getting enough rep to evade the rules is hard.
and then it only takes someone noticing one post to burn it all down.
The threshold to evade all findspam rules is 10001 (10000 is the highest max of any rule in the file). The thresholds for individual rules can be found by searching here for max_rep (the default is 1).
Think about it this way. If a user over 100 rep says "Keto" in a health-related answer, we probably don't want to report on that, as the likelihood that they got 100 rep and decided to spam keto products is very low. Similarly, we wouldn't want to stop watching the keyword "keto" considering it's a very high TP rate keyword (last I checked, anyway)
@Nick We already have way too many FP. There are a number of easy ways we could reduce FP dramatically, including discarding anything that looks anything like code. Here's a link to a simple regex that is over 99% FP.
and that's over 99% FP on posts that were reported
even 2-rep and 1-rep users are drastically different groups, I'd say (not every user in each, I mean the groups in general) (however you get 2 rep exactly)
I don't consider 135 rep to be high rep. It would be possible to form a voting ring, and then before the reversing script runs, spam with that account and not get caught by SD. Maybe the limit should be something above 200 (because that's the daily limit)? Just a thought.
Spammers aren't that smart. If you're going to build a voting ring to evade Smoke Detector of all things, you're probably forgetting site moderators and power users. Even then, why use that ring to spam of all things?
i haven't found any voting rings in my time; i only detected one sock user with two socks but it was from two months before i even found out, and i only noticed cuz the user made me suspicious in chat :P
granted voting rings are probably more common on sites like SO
Eh. As an SO example, if you see a particularly bad answer with a surprising amount of upvotes (and a bunch of downvotes) then it's worth getting slightly concerned. When I say "bad" I truly do mean little effort, barely answers the question if at all. Something nobody should think about upvoting.
Easier to move outward if you're a moderator and can see votes, but...usually people aren't very good at hiding and the socks interact with each other. Often quite a lot.
i've only seen users with like a few socks for upvoting that i've either encountered / heard of (on my site) but i think there are sometimes very large voting rings on sites like SO. can't remember / not sure if i should say exactly how many but... it's a lot, lol
long story short i got my account deleted once due to miscommunication, but when that happened i caused around 100-200 rep loss to multiple users, totalling at least a thousand or two rep across my site :P
and i was voting legitimately; i can imagine how much rep someone could lose from a ring getting destroyed
ha. Yeah, I've wondered how much rep people would lose if my account was deleted. Probably a decent chunk on Law, there aren't that many active posters and I have 654 live upvotes.
now that i think about it, several users voluntarily requested account deletion following the events of late 2019; i don't remember that having much effect, at least on my account; are those handled differently in terms of votes?
@lyxal i wonder how much the actual number would be. only one way to find out....... :)
And staff can choose whether to actually deduct rep from others. They'd probably choose not to if it's a user with a lot of votes who voted legitimately.
As I understand it, users with "an impactful number of votes" (defined vaguely) are given to CMs for transferring of votes to Community after confirming there was no abuse.
@hyper-neutrino No, all votes are reversed. There is no statute of limitations. We've deleted sockpuppets which have been active for years, and/or which have had thousands of votes, and/or sock rings with >100 sockpuppet accounts (I haven't personally found anything with that many socks). If there are more than X votes, then the choice to keep or remove the votes is kicked up to a CM.
@hyper-neutrino You know, I'm genuinely unsure. They managed to find quite a lot of really terrible posts before they even had access to review queues.
i wasn't a sock though so i think it was only 60 days? in any case users would've lost more than a couple hundred rep if all of my votes have been invalidated
3845/4344 of my SO downvotes are on deleted posts. The percentage would be higher if I stopped downvoting additional posts and waited for the Roomba to clean up more of them as well.
just curious (i'll move this to a private room if it shouldn't be public) if someone were to hack into and gain control of the entirety of charcoal (ignoring how practical that would be) (so this means full control and the admins can't shut it down or anything) and started using it for abuse (like nuking things with autoflaggers, etc), how quickly would it be able to be stopped?
Considering the local machine is near Thomas Ward... However long it'd take for him to wake up and turn it off. If they decided to host their own, they'd need a bunch of creds that are closely guarded, and even then, the API key could be revoked.
We needn't worry about any of that though. Mr. Ward's quite the security expert, iirc. Fueled only by caffeine and spite, he guards the realms of smoke.
It's the same philosophy as the earlier "Voting ring to avoid Smokey" example. If you're truly sophisticated enough to do that... Why are you on SE? :P
@Nick BTW, for a single case of undisclosed affiliation, tp is the preferred feedback, i.e. blacklisting the user with tpu is not necessary. The reason is that for the first offense, they just might not know the policy, and informing them in a comment (as I just did) often works to make sure they don't repeat it.
@Nick I wouldn't set much store by the 18 months. They don't appear to have any visible contributions, and even if they did, they could post lots of answers that don't link to their content, and so not had a chance to learn of the policy until now. I've definitely encountered fairly high rep users who're unaware of the policy until it's pointed out.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Mostly punctuation marks in body, mostly punctuation marks in title, repeating characters in body (124): ///[deleted]/// ✏️ by plshalp on philosophy.SE
@hyper-neutrino I don't remember the exact details, but try clicking the Team link in the pinned Links message. That probably has sufficient instructions on what to do; there's only a couple of steps. If that doesn't work, I can look through the transcript; I remember having a more detailed conversation about the process because it wasn't working for me (which was because of a bug that has since been fixed).
@metasmoke The chaotic neutral part of me really wants to fix the formatting in this mess of an attempt at spam...would make it's more obvious it's spam, too :-p
(lest anyone be concerned: I'm not actually going to do that)
