When forum spam escapes into news feeds

gaekwad · 2014-11-07 13:20:07

{This topic is a split off of a thread in the moderation forum. – Uli}

jakob wrote:

Thank you too. Is there anything that can be done about all the spam. Finding the flowers among the weeds in the rss feed isn’t much fun.

I have varied success with the Twitter feed – there are occasional replies that refer to the spam coming through, which doesn’t help:

In the absence of another solution, or perhaps a reevaluation of the current one, I think we just keep on truckin’.

Last edited by uli (2014-11-07 15:38:58)

Bloke · 2014-11-07 13:56:47

Presumably there’s a delay between the forum post and the tweet being posted? Can that be increased a tad? Or do we just need to stamp such posts out faster?

I’ve been pretty lax in the reporting / removal of spam accounts lately, since everyone else seems to be doing such a grand job of removing them. I can try to chip in more often if it’d help reduce the volume of rogue posts getting out.

I must admit to being ignorant of the way this auto-tweet thing works. Is it based on a time-since-content-posted (i.e. a time per message) or is it on some form of cron job? If the latter then we’ll always be battling this kind of thing, because there’ll always be a time when someone posts and the cron runs moments later, picking up their post and broadcasting it.

There seem to be a fairly hefty number of new registrations and spam posts in the last month or so. The companies behind them must be ramping up for Christmas sales…

philwareham · 2014-11-07 14:04:58

I’ve brought this up before, and it’s a feedburner account or something similar. I think upping the tweet time delay from 60 minutes to at least 120 of that’s possible would help catch rogue tweets. Naybe Robert can do that.

gaekwad · 2014-11-07 14:55:57

philwareham wrote #285542:

I think upping the tweet time delay from 60 minutes to at least 120 of that’s possible would help catch rogue tweets.

+1 for upping the delay. Anecdotally (and they’re my anecdotes as an @txpforum janitor), it’s less than 30 minutes. Most of the spam that I deal with tends to appear between 7am and 9am UTC, often in rapid succession. Right now, there are 107 followers, and that’s largely static. Most seem to be real people or orgs rather than junk.

Can IFTTT do something about the delay? Like, take the RSS (schedule, given time, whatever), wait a bit, then post to the Twitters, perhaps.

Devil’s advocate: if there’s a delay of two hours, is there still value in the alert in the first place? More devil’s advocate: is there sufficient value in the Twitter feed to keep it going?

uli · 2014-11-07 15:12:30

Shouldn’t we make a cut somewhere, like between jakob’s first post here and Pete’s following that one (which contains jakob’s post as a quote), and then make a new, public, topic of it in the Social Channnels forum so it’s more visible than in this hidden moderation forum?

michaelkpate · 2014-11-07 15:13:17

I have been trying to be more diligent about removing Spam – I actually went back and studied the instructions – but we all have to sleep sometime.

There is this recipe: https://ifttt.com/recipes/202570-rss-feeds-to-buffer-app-to-delay-tweets but someone would have to manage it.

gaekwad · 2014-11-07 15:15:58

uli wrote #285544:

Shouldn’t we make a cut somewhere, like between jakob’s first post here and Pete’s following that one (which contains jakob’s post as a quote), and then make a new, public, topic of it in the Social Channnels forum so it’s more visible than in this hidden moderation forum?

Yeah, this. A new public thread would be great to gather feedback.

uli · 2014-11-07 15:21:21

gaekwad wrote #285546:

Yeah, this. A new public thread would be great to gather feedback.

Is there any information above that somebody likes to keep among moderators here?

gaekwad · 2014-11-07 15:22:38

uli wrote #285547:

Is there any information above that somebody likes to keep among moderators here?

If the forum’s been patched and is safe, and it appears it has, I can’t see anything verboten.

michaelkpate · 2014-11-07 15:25:48

I looked at these

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/applications/how-to-automate-your-twitter-feed-5-apps-to-try-1117899

and Twitterfeed sounded promising but it functions on a timer which means it wouldn’t help if a spammer posted something just before the routine runs.

uli · 2014-11-07 15:38:31

Alright, split done. Pete, please feel free to name the topic to your liking/in perfect English/write a more appropriate introduction/etc., after all you’ve made the first post ;)

Last edited by uli (2014-11-07 16:00:19)

uli · 2014-11-07 17:37:50

michaelkpate wrote #285545:

There is this recipe: https://ifttt.com/recipes/202570-rss-feeds-to-buffer-app-to-delay-tweets but someone would have to managed it.

If this doesn’t require me signing a contract with IFTTT I’d volunteer on that one. Someone else?

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