Hey! I saw [here](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/413313/helpful-flags-were-raised-in-my-name?cb=1) that you can authorise charcoal to raise flags on your behalf and that spam is really bad at the moment so I figured I'd let my account be used to help out. It said new account need to be approved by an admin in here
@SurajRao I am aware of 8 admins. Currently in this room: Makyen, tripleee, Thomas Ward, ArtOfCode. Not currently in this room: Andy, angussidney, Undo, thesecretmaster.
@SamDean Thanks for signing up! We appreciate it. Your metasmoke account has been activated. If you're interested in more information about participating in Charcoal, there's an Introduction to Participating, which has helpful information. If you're wanting to set up autoflagging, which is always helpful, then the "Autoflagging" page of the above linked introduction has better instructions than I can easily type here.
@Makyen I just learned that SmokeDetector requires accounts for submitting flags, thought I'd sign up to help out. The website said I should ping a mod to have my account activated.
@vandench Thanks for signing up! We appreciate it. Your metasmoke account has been activated. If you're interested in more information about participating in Charcoal, there's an Introduction to Participating. If you're wanting to set up autoflagging, which is always helpful, then the "Autoflagging" page of the above linked introduction has better instructions than I can easily type here.
@CanO'Spam Thanks for signing up! We appreciate it. Your metasmoke account has been activated. If you're interested in more information about participating in Charcoal, there's an Introduction to Participating. If you're wanting to set up autoflagging, which is always helpful, then the "Autoflagging" page of the above linked introduction has instructions on how to set that up.
@vandench Additional people helping by providing feedback to SmokeDetector reports and/or reviewing reports on metasmoke (MS) is very useful. In fact, we have quite a large backlog of reports needing feedback.
If you'd like to provide feedback on reports, I can set up additional permissions (i.e. SmokeDetector privileges, e.g. feedback, and the Reviewer role on MS). I'm happy to do that for you. We just don't force people to participate, so don't give those permissions out without the person asking for them, or at least indicating they want to participate in that way.
@SmokeDetector fp- a bit suspicious, but looks like OP is asking for help via an online resource. No hits on the network for this, so watching domain anyway.
@Makyen we might want to check titles to see if they ahve a trailing \ and not a \\ at the end, or if they try and break it with an unescaped ]. But I'll leave you to fix the oddness ;)
Thinking about tossing help[\W_]*mi[\W_]*cro[\W_]*s[\W_]*oft[\W_]*com(?<!onlinehelp\.microsoft.com)(?<!offlinehelp\.microsoft\.com)(?<!windowshelp\.microsoft\.com) on the watchlist to see if it helps, but we haven't missed one of these in awhile. Would there be any point?
@Spevacus The regex contains an unescaped ".", which should be "\." in most cases. Append -force to the command if you really want to add this pattern.
@Spevacus SD/MS, and users handle deleting most of the posts quite quickly, with only a few seconds difference between a mod being involved and not. There's commonly multiple SO mods jumping on the user destructions (which are only a few clicks), not that those destructions really need to happen all that quickly, anyway (i.e. the user's IP will be blocked on SpamRam with the spam deletion of the post).
Where we (Charcoal) can probably improve is the time between the post going up and reporting to MS. That's still higher than I'd like (commonly a minute or three). It's not yet clear to me how much of the delay is on our side and how much of the delay is SE getting it out on the WebSocket (or not sending it on the WebSocket, as they don't send some SO posts).
Is there some time-tracking we could do to trace how long it takes to create an MS report from a post being scanned and determined to be a post that needs reported? It'd be neat to see how long it took for our spam checks to run against each problematic post and manufacture a report on it.
@JohnDvorak Yes, it's certainly possible to determine where the delays are. We can't do much about the delays in the WebSocket, but we should be able to improve our handling, if that's significant, which there are parts of it which probably are. It just takes time/effort. There are other things which are on the task list. :;
@Spevacus We can do profiling in both SD and MS. I have some dormant code in my copy of the SD repo with which I've done so in the past, at least for the detections. I intend to shake it out again, but haven't gotten to it.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad phone number in body, bad phone number in title, mostly punctuation marks in title, phone number detected in body, phone number detected in title, +1 more (398): "877-947-7788"help.micr.osoft.com "////|| by kriskof on stackoverflow.com
@Tyberius The message generated when you create an account also pings Makyen, apparently :) But you appear to have Flagger and Reviewer roles set up already.
@Tyberius I've activated your account on metasmoke. Please ask if there's anything else I/we can do for you. If you're interested in more information about participating in Charcoal, there's an Introduction to Participating.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad phone number in body, bad phone number in title, mostly punctuation marks in title, phone number detected in body, phone number detected in title, +1 more (398): **HE'Lp.mic'rOSoft.com**{877-947-7788} by enup1 on stackoverflow.com
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad phone number in body, bad phone number in title, phone number detected in body, phone number detected in title, potentially bad keyword in body, +2 more (465): 🦎HeLp.MicrOSOft.cOm"🦎877 947 7788🦎 by jen68sutton on stackoverflow.com
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad phone number in body, bad phone number in title, phone number detected in body, phone number detected in title, potentially bad keyword in body, +1 more (464): 💥8779477788 💥help.miCR.Osoft.com 💥 by benvreeland on stackoverflow.com
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Body starts with title and ends in url, link at end of body, potentially bad keyword in body, potentially bad keyword in title, potentially bad keyword in username, +1 more (269): Bitcoin Invest Group Inc by Bitcoin Invest Group Inc on meta.SE (@Ollie)
