**What the fuck?** --…
What the fuck?
Yeah, I needed some attracting title to share how ripe IndieHackers is turning.
Looking at the "Newest" timeline like I do every day, I'm seeing more and more spam post
- about Keto diet from a member that joined 1 hour ago
- about 50 articles related to Oracle certifications - one link at a time of course - by a member that joined one day ago
- and the list goes on and on and on...
So I decided to take action, report them and try to clean that timeline to only have good quality post - or at least Indie Hacker related things.
But at my greatest surprise, you cannot anymore.
Yep.
It's not possible to report a post, an article or a user.
@csallen, why?? All I wanted is to help!
Do you have some moderators on the website tracking these posts? Did you implement some sort of spam filtering?
Here are a few things that could be implemented:
- Validate any post from a new member that has created an account in less than 24h
- Re-enable the report button
- Set a "moderator" status to some trusted member, that can decide instead of you when a post needs moderation/deletion. You can overview the deleted post to ensure that any moderator is doing a correct job
This is getting out of hand, and that's sad :/
@csallen...please bring the report button back
these spammers are taking up valuable space from people who can teach us invaluable information about how we can make our businesses better .
E.J Ross: SearchTile.com
There's always been a lot of spam (well, for the past year) on IH, unfortunately. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to automatically get rid of it, but some % of it slips through the cracks. There's also a lot more on my to-do list to help fix it, including adding a report button. It'll get better over time.
EDIT: Looks like I broke my anti-spam script yesterday, so 100% of it has been getting through. Whoops.
Thank you for replying here, I appreciate :)
Having the anti-spam down explains a lot about the recent issues, that fixes one point :)
I wonder why you decided to remove the report button, I believe you had your valid reason behind it, but on "our" end, it was like a duty to report the bad posts and some of us were happy to do so.
I don't know your plans to fight spam, nor the processes in place right now. I'm also pretty sure I have no idea how hard it is to manage these, but I'd be happy to help if you need it, and others would too. That's the list I can do when IH is one of the website I open every day and read every (title) posts.
So, good luck on fighting spam, and you now you can rely on the community to fight these :)
Getting rid of the report button wasn't so much an intentional decision as it was a side effect of other changes that I made to the site. I planned to bring it back much earlier, but then I said to myself, why don't I just improve my anti-spam scripts and save everyone the work? So I made some significant improvements that probably save you guys a lot of time in reporting stuff, buuuuut I underestimated the human element. Psychologically, it just feels really good to be able to report spammers and really bad to see spam but not have the option to do anything. So I'll bring it back soon, probably next week.
Thanks for the offer to help, by the way! Making feedback posts like this one is quite helpful, as is using the report button (once I bring it back). 🤗
Wonderful :)
I'm also glad you didn't take the "what the fuck" title directly to you, it wasn't. It was more directed towards those spammers that degrade the quality of IH.
Thank you for IndieHackers and good luck for the fight !
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
Agreed. Sad to see communities turn this way after spammers get a hold of it.