SEDE: Number of spam posts per day, per week and per month.

AI Stack Exchange is definitely letting more through in the last week or so. I'm flagging a half dozen per day at the moment, whilst before about mid-July this was very rare.

I don't know if we've hit some spammer groups' radar and are under attack (against the general trend), or if something has happened to spam approaches and/or auto-detection. It makes the site less pleasant to use, so I hope someone with access to the anti-spam toolkit is working on this?

I'm not quite sure what that SEDE query is showing (not familiar with the data model), but the numbers seem off? I've flagged over 10 posts in August already, and seen that they have been removed - just on AI Stack Exchange - but the graph only shows 5 "spam" posts across all SE sites. That implies the query is making a strict definition of spam that doesn't include all the ones I have seen personally

On closer inspection, I think the query is just for AI Stack Exchange (at least there's some descriptive text that implies so), but the numbers still seem off. I have seen more spam personally on the site in last few days than the query is showing

@NeilSlater SEDE does not have access to deleted posts and only updates once a week (on Sunday).

I had no idea there was strike action, and that we relied on a volunteer service for spam removal . . .

I would have thought spam management would be a core SE feature provided by the company, as it heavily affects the quality of the site in a way that has nothing to do with the expert userbase.

Enough spam flags raised on a post will automatically delete it, and there are some measures to prevent spam from being posted, but SmokeDetector is much more effective.

Well I hope it can start running again. I'm happy to help out with flags for a few days, but I don't want my volunteer time here to be used up being a human spam filter.

@Mithical Actually, the queries I linked use the PostsWithDeleted table - only the deleted posts will be included in the stats that I've linked.

The stats only go until the last weekend (i.e., the most recent update of SEDE).

FROM PostsWithDeleted p INNER JOIN Votes v ON v.PostId = p.Id
WHERE v.VoteTypeId IN (##types?4,12##) AND p.DeletionDate IS NOT NULL

Ah, so most of the posts I am complaining about have been since then, presumably overlapping when Smoke Detector went down and we started seeing what is otherwise the normal level of spam attempts.

Somewhat related: What exactly do VoteTypeId=4 (offensive) and VoteTypeId=12 (spam) mean?

@NeilSlater Well, Smokey's been down since June 5th.

The fact the SD and many active flaggers were on strike is certainly one of the contributing factors why spam was more visible on several sites, recently. AFAICT Server Fault and Super User were getting quite a lot of spam.

Super User: Number of spam posts per day, per week and per month.

Server Fault: Number of spam posts per day, per week and per month.

And yes, the queries that I posted in my first message today were only about Artificial Intelligence.

Of course it is certainly possible that I mixed-up something when creating the queries or that the database does not actually contain all spam posts.

I think I have flagged at most 5 posts on Artificial Intelligence in a single day. You say that you had a day with twelve.

We'll see after the next update whether there is a day with more than 12 spam posts in the results that I've posted here.

Actually, here is an example of a post that I flagged as spam: ai.stackexchange.com/q/41220

And despite that, SEDE does not return VoteTypeId=12 for this post: data.stackexchange.com/ai/query/1373465/…

This probably means that this wasn't dealt with by the Community Bot. (I.e., removed revision history and all that stuff.)

To quote from Laurel's answer: "It looks like these are just Community's votes to delete posts as spam or abusive, which happens after 1 moderator red flag or N red flags from other users (currently 4 but usually 6)."

@MartinSleziak It was deleted by Community because the user was destroyed, but wasn't flag-deleted (i.e. not locked as spam).

"You say that you had a day with twelve." I think 6 was highest count this week - a half dozen. Although I have not neen actively counting. I may be able to spot this in my history - will check

Sorry, I read dozen (and missed that it was half dozen).

What Mithical writes is in agreement with Laurel's answer. (But I wasn't sure about the correct terminology.). If it was locked as spam, the database should contain VoteTypeId=12 too (from the Community User).

In any case, this is probably not that important - even if not every spam post is caught, the queries at least give some reasonable estimate whether the site is getting more spam now than in that past.

I was playing with the queries mainly because I was curious whether the stats will show some significant difference comparing the times "without SD" and "with SD".

Flags this week from Monday - 1, 4, 2, 4, 4. I probably combined yesterday evening and this morning - I have flagged 6 in the last 24 hours