Echo JS: Dealing with spammy articles

5 up and 0 down, posted by tracker1 1888 days ago 8 comments

MaxArt 1888 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼

The worst part is that spam posts all make to the RSS feed, my primary summary for Echo JS. So yes for every action that could mitigate this.

I would have contributed to new features for this forum, but the irony of a JavaScript community on a Ruby platform is concrete, and I don't know Ruby ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But there *are* cases where something more could have be done. Spam posts were prompt removed, but spammers weren't banned. As you said, new account could be easily created, but it's still a nuisance, even for them.

Replies

peterc 1885 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼

We had a similar problem on http://www.rubyflow.com/ - a similar Ruby community site. Our solution for a long time was to only include items from "approved" users in the RSS feed. This worked very well but then people got annoyed they weren't added to the approved list and we didn't have enough mods to catch up with it.

So now we have the RSS feed on a 3 hour delay from the live site which means spammy posts are often reported or moderated away before they hit the RSS feed. It's not absolutely ideal but works given the circumstances. To create such a delay involves only the most basic of tweaks to the query that fetches the items for the RSS feed.

tracker1 1887 days ago. link 3 points ▲ ▼

I agree... I've thought about trying to get the app running locally, etc.. so I can try and maybe create a node/js version of the site, running against the same database.  I don't remember enough ruby to be productive at all in the codebase either.