Annoucements, especially those on the front page, and case studies get a lot of comments that I suspect are spam. The problem is, how do you tell a legitimate "congrats" from a spammy one? It's fairly obvious when you look at the person's tracker and they've only ever participated in this type of thread. But you can't just look at the post and say, yeah, that's spam.

So I'm wondering what, if anything, should be done about this. On the one hand, links are nofollow'd in the forums and they aren't really gaining any benefit that way. On the other hand, they are getting exposure and potential clicks by being in popular posts. So what sort of policy could we make? One possibility is to say only Drupal sites are allowed to be linked to in that sort of post. But that is complicated because then you have a different signature policy depending on the post type.

So I don't know what the best solution is... I just wanted to put this out there and get some ideas. I hate just ignoring posts that I'm fairly sure are only put there to spam but I'm not sure what to do.

Michelle

Comments

vm’s picture

vm commented

If the post can be definitively called spam, I don't see an issue with deleting or unpublishing. Typically I check a users tracker and use the information provided by the tracker as a determining factor.

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Well, the whole point of this is for posts that can't definitely be called spam. Is someone saying "Congrats on the new site" spamming because they have a link in their signature? If they do that on 10 posts, there's a pattern, but what if it's one or two?

Michelle

vm’s picture

vm commented

I tend to take a look at the length of the time in the community. If someone registered simply to say "nice" site and post sig links. I tend to unpublish it.

avpaderno’s picture

avpaderno
he/him
Primary language Italian
Location Brescia, 🇮🇹 🇪🇺
commented

I agree that it is not easy to decide, in some cases.
Rather than removing a legitimate comment which should appear spam, I would leave it. Sometimes it is easy to mark a comment as spam, but to see spam even where there isn't is not a good message that we would give to the community.

vm’s picture

vm commented

I'd rather err on the side of unpublishing rather than leaving alone. If a comment is unpublished it can be republished if a user files an issue.

avpaderno’s picture

avpaderno
he/him
Primary language Italian
Location Brescia, 🇮🇹 🇪🇺
commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.