The 3D Printing Community is on a “Lockdown” of sorts. To join, you must be approved for now. Anyone who is already a member can post or whatever without problems, but the spam is getting out of control and I’m hoping that making it invite only for a while will knock it off the radar for the time being.
I was wondering about that notification “… wants to join”.
Yes, the spam is ridiculous right now, but i don’t think locking the community is the right way to handle it. It’s not like i hadn’t thought about it, too, and i don’t have a better solution either. This is something Google really needs to fix.
That being said, i have no clue how much spam actually reaches people’s feeds (probably much than we’d like, as it sounds from +Peter van der Walt’s input). Should we let the community vote?
I see around 4 “teen” posts per day. Most from 3d printing. I’ve been reporting them as I see them. Luckily no nsfw posts have made it to my feed.
I’ve seen several nsfw posts on here. I think I report at a minimum one a day nsfw or otherwise.
@Thomas_Sanladerer I had only seen a 1 or 2 a day here for the past few weeks. Nothing NSFW though.
Hmm, also not too sure about that move. And how do we proceed with the requests to join? (same as with Tom btw, the sudden avalanche of corresponding notifications got me buried a bit)
I undid it. Didn’t realize it was going to cause so much additional notification to the mods. It was almost on par with the amount of spam I’m having to remove hourly. Every hour, I’m having to deal with 10+ pieces of porn, bestiality, etc. Gah – I’m desperate for a solution to this.
How do you know who to approve? Most of the profiles are blank.
Blank profiles I simply removed. I’d hover over a bunch and they’d have things like “Thank you” listed as their personal URL, and stupid crap like that, I’d remove those too.
It would all be so easy if @Google added some means of restricting who can post/post links based on join up date or something like that. Every forum software on the planet has that… But yeah, apparently you guys already weed out most of the porn, it’s not as bad for me, but I still remove a couple posts like that per day from the stream plus clear the moderation queue. Also, the new design sucks for moderation tasks.
I’m afraid just the size of the group makes it a target. Even if membership had been left restricted, that would only have kept new spammers at bay until the restriction was lifted.
It’s disappointing that Google couldn’t bring even a little of their significant spam e-mail detecting expertise to bear on this.
@Ashley_Webster , you don’t see a lot of it because other people report it. The moderation panel gets so filled with stuff that I either ban everything hastily and almost accidentally ban legitimate posts, or if I don’t check it, it just sits there - the user thinks it’s still there, but nobody sees it.
This is actually causing a lot of people not to be able to view this community at places like work, because there’s some random chance they’re going to run into beastiality, porn, etc.
Given how I’ve been yelled at by parents in the past simply for foul language, I’m sure there are lots of participants that just simply never make it here because of their parents or other stuff.
I’m just trying to keep the place clean, and it’s getting more difficult daily.
It’s strange that so many people seem to want to post in this community with non related material. Why on earth would they see this place as somewhere to post? Especially if they have nothing to do with 3d printing?
Are they thinking of making money from a bunch of people who are trying to save money by DIY or something?
@Andrew_Hodel I think the thought process is more “get this to as many people as possible”, if there’s anything at all.
Also, just reported 2 more spam posts. Woot.
FWIW, I’m on the West coast and it seems to me probably half (if not more lately) of the emails I get from this forum are spam. A while back there was a lot of nsfw stuff getting through. Now it’s just a bunch stupidness.
Hopefully it doesnt get as bad as some facebook pages that even being closed groups, some spammers will get in. They will be indistinguishable from a normal person.
I for one appreciate all the moderators hard work. I only see one or two objectional spams a week. More if I’m surfing late at nite, pacific time zone.
I have to say I haven’t seen a lot of spam in this community. If you guys are removing even half a much as you say then a big thanks. I hope someone ( @Google ) does sort out some form of automated spam filtering.
@pave_spectre , there are those of us who have notifications turned on for this community that also get emails. What happens is no matter how fast I am, those emails still get sent. So even though we’re removing them, it still floods people.
I noticed that @Thomas_Sanladerer added a bunch more mods to the community, hopefully those will have the time when they check to keep things removed. This community is getting bombarded though.
@ThantiK why we don’t start (if you didn’t yet) to develop a website(forum alike) of the community.