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Ask PG: Spam Control on HN
Given HN's incredibly easy signup process (not even a CAPTCHA), one would think that spammers would be going crazy in here. But I haven't seen a single bit of spam, either in the comments or new articles lineup.
How is this achieved? I mean what kind of spam filters?
- noodle 18y agoi, and probably many other people, flag anything that looks like spam.
- knightinblue 18y agoso does a comment/article immediately get deleted when someone clicks 'flag'? or does it get sent to the moderators for review? If it's the latter, I thought I'd still see the comment/article till it's deleted. But I haven't seen any spam anywhere. I'm just saying that it can't be solely due to human editing.
- ojbyrne 18y agoThere is a "showdead" option in your profile (though there might be a minimum karma required). Then you can see stuff that's been flagged (presumably beyond some threshold).
- knightinblue 18y agoYeah, I have it turned on and I see the dead articles, but those are more along the grounds of readers subjectively disagreeing with questionable ideas/content. I was talking about never seeing comments/links that are universally agreed upon as spam, like links to viagra sites etc.
- icey 18y agoWell, there's also a question of scale at play. I don't think HN gets enough visitors yet to make it worthwhile for spammers to target here instead of say, reddit.
- Shamiq 18y agoAdmins here are amazing. Distributed responsibility, easy to see flagging, and an active user set all help the keep spam to a minimum.
- knightinblue 18y agoSo no comment spam filters like akismet or anything? Then I'm incredibly impressed at the effectiveness. I just thought that since HN has the same basic functionality as reddit, it must have a far better set of spam filters than reddit.
- pierrefar 18y agoI've seen a tiny bit of spam, and usually by the time I refresh the page, it's gone. Sometimes in UK morning time, the spam lasts, oooh, 2 minutes instead of the usual ms. It's even faster these days than a few months ago. And the community here is very zealous about the quality of submissions, and I bet a lot of people flag spam promptly.
- pg 18y agoIP, site, and account bans catch maybe 80% of spam. The rest gets killed by human editors.
- knightinblue 18y agoGot it. Thanks Paul :)
- cmtk04 18y agois there a pre-built list of IPs and sites available somewhere? it just seems to be easier than building a list from scratch...
- ananthrk 18y agoFrom an old post, List of banned sites and why are they banned? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910
- rms 18y agoOne thing that helps is that this is a dumb site to spam. There's no SEO/traffic benefit from submitting crap here.