A while ago I volunteered to moderate one, later a few more tags here at DEV. For some reason the admins of the site also gave me some extra rights.
So I was blessed, or cursed, depending on the time of the day, with the ability to use some features on DEV to report spam.
I am not sure if this actually gives me more power than all the other users have. I think every user, yes, you too can report abuse by clicking on the 3 dots on the left-hand side of an article and then clicking on Report Abuse. It brings up a form where you have a selection and you can mark it as a spam. The only difference might be, that I see a bigger button to do so.
Anyway, in the last several weeks I started to post a lot of articles on DEV. With that I started to care more and started to watch the latest posts to report spam.
Observations
I started to see a pattern, that spam messages tend to be posted by new users. This might not be very surprising, after all a spammer probably registers an account and starts to spam immediately.
I assume it is rare that a user would post several good articles and then starts to spam.
The tool to help me
Using the API of DEV, or rather that of Forem, the engine used for DEV, I created a web site to help me locate spam messages. The site shows the most recently posted articles. Currently showing al the articles posted in the last 24 hours. It also highlights articles that have a higher chance of being spam.
The rules
I used several rules to highlight posts:
- An article by an author who registered less than 2 days ago.
- An article by an author who posted more than once in the last 24 hours.
- The first article of an author.
Obviously just because someone has signed up recently and already posted an article does not mean that s/he is spamming. Actually none of the above "proves" that someone is a bad actor or a post is a spam. So this application does not report anything to DEV. It only displays information to help a human decide which article is spam and which account to report.
Soon I realized that most of the articles that are the first articles of an older account are totally legitimate ones. Hence while meeting either of the first two conditions is marked by red tags on the article, meeting the last condition is marked by a green tag.
Most of the articles with a single green tag are genuine first posts of a person.
Reporting spam welcoming new authors
Every few hours, when I have some spare time I visit the page and start to scroll down focusing especially on articles that have a red or green mark. I pick the ones that look spam, check out the actual article and if necessary I report them.
I also pick the ones that have a green mark and try to comment on them. Sometimes just by congratulating them on their first article. Sometimes by suggesting improvements. e.g. recommending to add tags in general and language tags in particular, using Markdown better, or asking them to include links to what they refer to in their posts.
Welcoming new authors
Which brought me to the part where anyone could use this site. You too could check the site from time to time. Locate articles by first-time authors and welcome them!
People love it when you notice them.
Source
The source code is linked from the site.
Top comments (16)
First off, it's been so awesome having your help fighting spam, Gabor!
We've noticed all the reports coming in from ya and it's really been helping us to clear out spam.
This tool ya came up with sounds awesome! Both @ben and @peter have been developing similar tools for recognizing spam and I'm sure they'll be interested in seeing your methods here.
I also love that you've created a section for welcoming new folks. It's so cool to give encouragement to those first time authors out there! So appreciate ya sharing the love like this!
@szabgab great tool. What about DEV spam that follows each of us (our profile) time to time?
I am not sure what you mean. I noticed one account that keeps up-voting my articles that I think does this only so I visit their profile where they promote some event. Otherwise I have not noticed and regular strange behavior. If you meant something else, would you care to explain further?
In any case I think the only thing I can do on that extra interface is to report articles.
@szabgab i have noticed i recieve notification quite frequent, where some strange accounts follows me back. In term stragne DEV.to accounts i mean accounts that have zero informations on profile and don't even publish articles.
Hmm, are these new accounts? When someone signs up these days they are offered a list of people to follow. They might follow you that way and because they are new their account is empty. I wonder is this is what you see.
@szabgab yes. This sounds legit to this topic. There are some accounts that are quite long time here, but still with zero informations or with strange informations provided. But let's just ignore it.
Some people may not want to list any information publicly. Even if they have no activity listed they could still be valid. E.g. someone that reads posts without commenting.
Also if you do find a spam user such as someone that spams in comments, you can report the comment as spam, and even the user more generally.
Honestly, the spam seems less bothersome and less prevalent than the clickbait and clickbait-adjacent content. "I reduced the lines of CSS in my project by 50%--CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT HOW!" "This one simple trick and you will NEVER USE HTML AGAIN!" etc.
As a moderator I do my best to limit these post types from being visible on the timeline as best as I can. Only so many hours in the day though. It is a top focus for myself to try and ensure that the content you are served to the timeline is quality content and not the click bait type that you mentioned. Just wanted you to know it doesn’t go unnoticed and it’s definitely something we pay attention to but it’s hard to get them all.
That's really cool! Both as a way to highlight spam posts and welcome new writers.
If I may suggest, perhaps have another page that's more filtered down to potential scam posts (or a filter in the current page)? This way the posts that are potentially scam will have more visibility to "reviewers". At the moment I am seeing innocuous recent posts that are not spam, which kind of defeat the purpose a little bit as I can read those recent posts on Dev.to itself.
Good idea. I opened an issue for myself
This is awesome!
Awesome ! 🤩💪🏼
Can someone please teach me (or provide a resource) how to create a series in dev.to ?
When you edit a post in the top right corner there is a link called "Jekyll front matter". That's where you have the explanation.
In a nutshell: go to each article you'd want to be part of a series called 'foobar' and add to the header (front matter) the following line:
Meant to ask this question in dev.to/derlin/series-vs-single-whi....
But you still replied!
You are an awesome person !!