Has anyone else received unsolicited email (spam) from a https://startups.stackexchange.com/ user (I can provide the user name if necessary)?
Notes:
The From and Return path names exactly match a https://startups.stackexchange.com/ username (I realise that these can be forged but this seems un...
@DavidPostill I'd bet you that our spammer ran a program of some sort - probably hit the SE API to find users with more than a threshold of rep on St.SE, then scraped the web for their names and/or websites and/or twitter usernames, and tried to find email addresses
@Magisch Triply so if it's a computer doing it for them and they just have to click Start.
@ArtOfCode There are entire companies that sell personal information bundling on "High value targets" (e.G. people companies think its worth targeting individually for spam) via scraping means
@DavidPostill Nothing they can do, unfortunately. They won't suspend him, because he's done nothing wrong on the site. SE can't do anything either, because he didn't scrape the email off your profile so it's not against the TOS.
quite literally the only thing you can do is remove your email from the internet (ha!)
well, either that or respond - either send them a blistering complaint and hope you scare them off (likely), or spambait them: pretend you're interested, then start asking dumb questions until they tell you to leave them alone - see: James Veitch
On a weekly basis, the Community Team vets a handful of feature requests to be sent over to the engineering team and estimated, scheduled into next month's plan, and built (or sometimes rejected for technical reasons).
We try to select things that we think can make the most people happy, and ...
@Magisch it's okay. I'm sure Tim's heard worse. You already know you're on a line, so go take 5 - away from the computer - and come back with a clear head.
I've been planning to make the trip over here for about two weeks... was hoping I'd have some announcements but really it's just that (despite what it may have seemed like) your pings have not been getting routed to /dev/null.
My spam project hiatus took longer than I expected but I'm back on it now. For you, my next step is looking into your quota request. Haven't been able to get hold of anyone who knows about the API, which is my fault, not theirs, but I'll keep at it. Looks like next week at the earliest because people are traveling/on other projects.
@Pops I know we said this in December's email, but: we don't necessarily need someone who knows the API to press buttons to turn up our quota. If you guys are happy with it, we can just register another key, and handle balancing between them ourselves - that gets us double the quota with no work and little discussion your end.
Executive summary of requests: 1.) Can we gets a higher API quota OR register a second key without consequences? 2.) We are currently issuing one automatic flag on many posts that SmokeDetector reports. Can we raise that limit to between 2 and 5 flags? If yes, what can we raise it to?
@ArtOfCode You probably understand this better than I do. Actually there's no "probably" because I don't know the first thing about the API. Which is why I want to ask someone who does; maybe there's some consequence that I don't have the knowledge and you don't have the access to foresee, or maybe there's some additional knob a dev can turn that is superior to you just getting a second key and load balancing.
@Pops okay, that makes sense. The quota thing isn't super-urgent, anyway, so we've got plenty of time for you to work on that and talk to whoever you need to
What I'm thinking is, everything you've said sounds good, but let's be honest, ultimately, it's not my problem; flags get handled by mods, so if they're happy with the quality of the flags (which I assume they are) and wouldn't mind the extra volume (that one I'm not so sure about) then I would like it too.
@Pops this might actually result in lower volume. It means a post accumulates 3 or 4 spam flags quickly, so only the last 2 come in at human speed - the post gets nuked quicker, so mods are less likely to see the flags.
@Pops and I know in the end it's not your problem, but we're asking a CM so that if the mods complain to you guys then we can say "we discussed it with them and it was okay", rather than saying "oh yeah didn't we tell you we've been almost nuking all your posts?"
@ArtOfCode Sorry, what I meant by that was "I'm not the one doing the work of physically handling the flag, I have to put myself in that person's shoes" but I somehow momentarily forgot that we were talking about spam flags.
We have some ridiculous data sets and quality control in play, ridiculous enough that the predicted accuracy of autoflagging is far above that what we have as humans on the site - and we're all very high accuracy flaggers
Okay. So a post comes in. You are as close to certain as you can be that it is spam without actually being truly sure. Currently, your system is already casting one spam flag on that post automatically. You are asking permission to cast an additional n spam flags in that situation (but not enough to get it nuked without a human looking at it). Is that about the shape of it?
We even have automatic self-correction in place where if a reason becomes unreliable due to recent events the system will self-adjust what it considers worth flagging
@Pops heh, okay. So we'll start it off at 3 flags per post. If that goes okay, are you happy for us to increase it (with discussion among ourselves) to 4 - or potentially later on 5 - or would you like us to have another discussion with you guys before we do that?
Might not be a bad idea to ask the people who have volunteered their accounts to re-sign-up, just to be extra-clear about the "responsible for the flags cast in your name" thing, now that the autoflagging is going up. Really just on principle, not because I'm worried or anything.
> Warning: for all the joking about, this is serious. By ticking this box, you are explicitly consenting to your Stack Exchange account being used to cast flags automatically based on data collected by SmokeDetector.
> While we believe this has a high rate of accuracy and have designed the system to reflect this, flags cast using your account are your responsibility, and many invalid flags can in some cases result in your SE account being suspended. Only tick the box if you are happy with this responsibility.
I'm curious if you have examples of the false positives. I thought about asking before but I didn't think it was too relevant because I think 0.02% is better than my own spam detection rate.
Has anyone else received unsolicited email (spam) from a https://startups.stackexchange.com/ user (I can provide the user name if necessary)?
Notes:
The From and Return path names exactly match a https://startups.stackexchange.com/ username (I realise that these can be forged but this seems un...
On a weekly basis, the Community Team vets a handful of feature requests to be sent over to the engineering team and estimated, scheduled into next month's plan, and built (or sometimes rejected for technical reasons).
We try to select things that we think can make the most people happy, and ...
