Tuesday, April 12, 2016

If you are a Community Owner/Moderator or post to communities, you'll find this post and comments of interest.

If you are a Community Owner/Moderator or post to communities, you'll find this post and comments of interest. It concerns the new spam filters. Well worth a read.

Originally shared by Ed S

An FYI post. Just had two posts land in moderation - both are false positives. Usually we don't even see one per week in moderation, so maybe something changed. Both posts had a half-dozen (legit) links.

Post 1:
Photo post (google-hosted image)
Links in body: one to wikipedia, five to png files hosted at googleapis, one to ieee.
Not a frequent poster, not a problematic poster.

Post 2:
Featured link to github.
Links in body: one to youtube, four others to three sites.
Poster is a frequent poster to his stream, not a frequent poster to communities, not a problematic poster

In the best case, the algorithm for spam detection has gone a bit wrong. In the worst case, we have malicious flagging of acceptable posts. I don't think that's too likely, but I know of no tools to illuminate that.

As ever, I expect these posts to get very little attention even though they have now been approved - I believe Gplus taints such posts and doesn't show them to many people. As one is a photo post, we have the "number of views" statistic available so we can check.

3 comments:

  1. It appears moderators may be a busier until the algorithm is refined. A new task of separating actual spam from the false positives.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bill Graham Yep- and the darn thing can only be turned on or off if you use the "new" interface. :/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well Andrew Hatchett​ I personally have been trying to use the new interface more as I expect to wake up any morning now with only that option anyway.

    ReplyDelete