Fighting spam in Drupal groups

Drupal Groups is an open community site where anyone can contribute to Drupal-related discussions. This openness often results in spam. We have various processes in place for fighting spam, listed below.

1. Report spam in the issue queue. Include a link to the spam and also to the user's profile. Include the user's account name in the issue title, e.g. "spam from spammeruser."
2. Get the "spam reporter" role and flag spam. If you're frequently reporting spam, this role will allow you to do so more quickly with a simple flag link.
3. Review spam reports in the issue queue. Confirming spam reports are, indeed, spam and marking as RTBC helps speed up deletion.
4. Delete spam. After you have a record of reporting spam, you can request the "spam killer" role via the issue queue, which allows you to directly delete spam.

Deleting spam

People with the "spam killer" role should follow this process when deleting spam:

1. Identify whether the user is a spambot or an actual person. A person may post something that looks like spam because they don't understand the purpose of a group, or perhaps their otherwise legitimate account has been compromised. A spambot will only ever post spam, usually within a few days of registering.
2. For spam bots, delete spam and block user. Users should be blocked on drupal.org, which will block them on all subdomains (including groups.drupal.org) where they have accounts. Both comments and nodes should be checked (with the "Administer comments" and "Administer nodes" tabs on the user page) and deleted.
3. For potentially real people posting spam, unpublish the spam and contact the user. Compromised accounts should also have passwords reset.
4. When in doubt, open an issue. As important as the war against spam is, real members of our community should not become collateral damage. If you're not entirely confident a user is a spammer or content is spam, get a second opinion before blocking.

What is spam?

For the purposes of Drupal Groups, spam is unsolicited promotional material. This generally involves linking to commercial sites that have nothing to do with Drupal. Spam does not include promoting commercial Drupal services in threads specifically requesting information about commercial Drupal services, nor should language proficiency be treated as an indication of spam. Usually spam is obviously spam, but when it's not clear, always ask someone else.