After turning on the feature to hold the posts from new members for our community, I suggested that the moderators and owners of a Python (programming) community do the same. It seems they also decided to turn on the ask to join feature and they had 1/50 join requests being a real person. That seems to have led them to having them send the owner a message to join. I kind of think they are perhaps going too far to fight spam, but I can certainly understand their frustration. G+ spam is really killing G+. They really need to improve their restrictions on making new accounts and deleting violator accounts. At least things have improved a bunch here. Of course, it is harder to see how much spam was seen by non-moderator members of the community too and that is something else that G+ needs to fix.
Honestly, I’d just simply ban certain words altogether. “Forex”, for example. Any arabic, indian, korean, chinese, cyrillic or japanese characters at all. “Trump”, “Clinton”, “Bernie”, etc…anything political related.
Yesterday I got a small flood of new users posting “wow” all to the same (non wow-able) post. I had to manually ban them…all had asian names, and all were likely trying to defeat the spam filter.
I really like that places like Voat, Reddit, etc provide an API for people to make bots. If I were allowed to do that here without incurring a ban on my account, I’d work on a bot that checked those URLs automatically and start working on heuristics to auto remove.
And there’s always the whatsapp ones. Fun…
I imagine that moderating it by yourself must be a lot of work, and just wanted to say thanks. It has been a cleaner site lately.
@Jeremiah_Coley that’s why this community actually has so many mods and owners. Spreads the work out, and allows us to be more diligent; though I suspect only like 4 people are actually sifting through this on a regular basis.
I’ll admit to semi-regular. I’m usually on my phone and there’s nothing I can do on iOS.
Anytime I open the group on my desktop though, I’ll sort thru the queue. This is usually late at night.
Speaking of which – I just got rid of a bunch of mods. Brook, Sanjay and Josh, etc – people I haven’t seen post in a very long while. I don’t expect they’re active on the community.
+Peter van der Walt I didn’t remove you; you’ve still active on G+. Even if it’s not in the 3D printing community, I figured you still got the notifications and still checked there occasionally. I don’t think I’ve seen a single reply or post from sanjay or josh in like 8 months. If I removed someone who really was actively moderating, but just wasn’t active posting - I’m sure they’ll message me.
I haven’t seen spam since the restriction if that helps comming from a standard member
@Alex_Krause that is reassuring.
I hardly see stuff in the moderation queue anymore. Big improvement.