12 ms·
Remind HN: Go to Noobstories, flag spam
- gte910h 16y agoI do not understand
- vibhavs 16y agoNoobstories contains links posted from newly-created user accounts. The category is intended for moderation and tends to have more spam than others - the OP is asking you to flag spam articles on Noobstories to maintain the overall high-quality of HN.
- PCheese 16y agoHow does one "flag as spam"? I don't see any such links on either the article discussion page or the user page. Example: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652503 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652503
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- dschobel 16y agothe title is clickable
- dschobel 16y agoYikes, 2 out of every 3 submissions (as of right now, at least) are [dead]. This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the goodwill volunteerism of HNers.
- pg 16y agoDon't worry, that's normal. Low, in fact, because this is a weekend. There are already such solutions, and those are what killed most of these submissions. But I'm happy to have humans helping out too.
- tomjen3 16y agoJesus. Can't you make hn links non-follow? At least of the newbies?
- icey 16y agoLinks under a certain karma threshold are marked nofollow. I think the criteria is 4 or 5 karma.
- _delirium 16y agoDoesn't seem to deter a large proportion of spammers, either--- I guess spamming is cheap enough that you might as well shotgun it, instead of bothering to research each site's nofollow policies. If you ever look at Slashdot's submission queue, there's a ton of spam in there too, despite the fact that it gets pretty quickly buried, is nofollowed on a robots.txt-prohibited page that not even many humans visit, and has no chance of being posted by the manual story-posting process.
- pg 16y agoActually most individual spammers learn fairly quickly that spamming HN doesn't work. At any given time the spammers are mostly new arrivals.
- jbellis 16y agohow are we supposed to find the noobstories link normally?
- MarkSweep 16y agoAt the bottom of the page there is a "lists" link. noobstories is listed there.
- wealthyox 16y agoI never knew there was so much spam. I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader / lurker than a spammer.
- jacquesm 16y ago> I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader / lurker than a spammer. The fact that you write this more or less already proves your point. Spammers would not engage in conversation (at least, not normally).
- charliepark 16y agoI'm sure the scenarios and solutions have been thought through, but this is an issue that frustrates me, especially in the mornings, when activity is lighter, and there's a higher noise-to-signal ratio. (Or maybe that's just when I notice it more.) I flag what I can, and I'm sure the automated filters do catch most (per PG's comment), but there seems to be a really easy way to combat most of this: 1. accounts need to be active for X days before they can comment (at all) 2. accounts need to have a karma score over Y to submit posts Wouldn't that resolve most of these stories?
- oconnore 16y ago#1: No, increasing the latency of the time it takes to post spam has nothing to do with the throughput. #2: Probably not a good idea. It's very hard to get lots of karma from comments alone, and you start to cut in on actually useful posts, like a new founder posting a link to his/her company at launch.
- petercooper 16y agoRe #2, it'd only take even needing 4 or 5 karma to dissuade the majority of spammers. And hard? The majority of my > 10k karma comes from comments - possibly even over 90%. It's not far fetched to expect people to have posted one or two comments a couple of people vote up before being able to submit and it'd decimate this problem.
- ez77 16y agoIt would help to have the "noobstories" header on the main HN page. Only after typing in the URL http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories is that header visible.
- hellrich 16y agoRelated to quality: Is there any possibility to filter the RSS feed?
- petercooper 16y agoWhy not restrict submissions to users with over, say, 10 karma? Only a tiny subset of spammers would write comments to get over that hurdle (though it would only take a couple of reasonable ones). Has this been discussed extensively before?
- duck 16y agoYeah, I've thought the same thing as it seems like it would be helpful (but still possible compared to something like the dribbble invite system). Also, another idea I had would be to make link submissions cost karma. It could even be dynamic based on your average story up-votes (i.e if you submit stories that get up-votes it costs you 1 karma, otherwise more). In the end, this is PG's site and I'm sure he has thought of (and tried) a lot of things.
- sprout 16y agoThat makes anonymous posting difficult to do without degrading the quality of the site.
- robryan 16y agoI wonder if a post anonymous button would work or would it just lead to an overuse of anonymous posting. Something reasonable would be to restrict it to 1 anonymous topic a week and only anonymous replies in that single topic.
- lotharbot 16y agoRelated: go to noobcomments [0] and downvote trolls and spammers, and give upvotes and thoughtful responses to those who deserve them. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
- taitems 16y agoIs there a list of all the hidden HN pages located somewhere? There appear to be a few pages that you can't get to in your top navigation bar, eg: - http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best - http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories - http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments
- aresant 16y agoLook at the bottom left of the page - left most menu says "lists" and takes you to http://news.ycombinator.com/lists http://news.ycombinator.com/lists