Ok the amount of spam is getting way too high in my opinion. Is there some way we can make this more private?
It is pretty amazing, I was wondering if Google would put an image recognizer in and just automatically quarantine posts that have only an image with a woman in it. That would catch all the Gaabuy spam. Presumably you can set the group private so only members can post but then you end up with the work of adding members.
FWIW I’ve reached out to some of my former Google colleagues to see if there is anything getting done on the G+ spam front.
I see the spam but hope you won’t shut out those of us not in the business/field - this site is wonderful for those of us interested, novice, etc! Good luck
I have suggested OCR with a list of words to look out for. gaabuy would obviously be one of the words to look out for. If people do not go to their URL, there is no point in them posting except perhaps to piss people off.
I have also suggested not allowing posts that do not have actual words (outside of an image) when a person has not posted at least X amount of community posts that were not reported.
Sorry, this community will always be a public one.
@Derek_Hanrahan My guess is that reviewing all of the profiles for the people that are applying for membership would be a rather large pain in the ass.
It’s not even about reviewing profiles. When people see “private community”, they’re not nearly as likely to even attempt to “apply” because, hell…private community.
In a world where I continually push open source, and sharing, and freedom of information, making this community private would be a HUGE fucking mistake.
Big fucking deal…there’s some spam. We take care of it quicker than any other community out there, and it’s a small price to pay for the huge amount of shared knowledge, and awesome things posted here.
Closing this community off has nothing to do with increasing/decreasing the mods workload. It has to do with being open, and available to everyone. As soon as this community goes private, all posts are hidden from the public. That’s just flat out not going to happen.
I’d love to see gaabuy get LOIC’d. It’s probably not going to do anything about the amount of spam, but it would be extremely satisfying to see that site go down.
@NathanielStenzel indeed. It’s more work to click through thousands of new member requests than to remove ten spam posts a day.
@Chuck_McManis let us know if we can give some input regarding what could be improved.
I tried to use a python library to do OCR, but it seems the library was out of date with reality. If Google had OCR software to use on the stuff though, that would be such a damned quick solution to 99% of the spam (gaaabuy).
Does G+ have any kind of documented API we can use to gather posts in the community? Or is this going to have to be some sort of lxml parsing, and so forth?
I haven’t tried LOIC on the gigabit pipes here at University yet… But IT would probably get mad at me.
@ThantiK no API for communities to my knowledge.
Well, I found something useful. I do not know how to get google plus to get off their butts and do this though.
[nathan@localhost pytesser-read-only]$ tesseract gaabuy-spam.jpg test -psm 6
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine v3.02.02 with Leptonica
[nathan@localhost pytesser-read-only]$ cat test.txt
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Mhhhh. Lemme check with some friends from my Google Developer Group days. Maybe @Van_Riper knows who to annoy 