

Ask PG: Spam Control on HN - knightinblue

Given HN's incredibly easy signup process (not even a CAPTCHA), one would think that spammers would be going crazy in here. But I haven't seen a single bit of spam, either in the comments or new articles lineup.<p>How is this achieved? I mean what kind of spam filters?
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pg
IP, site, and account bans catch maybe 80% of spam. The rest gets killed by
human editors.

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cmtk04
is there a pre-built list of IPs and sites available somewhere? it just seems
to be easier than building a list from scratch...

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ananthrk
From an old post,

List of banned sites and why are they banned?
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910>

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noodle
i, and probably many other people, flag anything that looks like spam.

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knightinblue
so does a comment/article immediately get deleted when someone clicks 'flag'?
or does it get sent to the moderators for review?

If it's the latter, I thought I'd still see the comment/article till it's
deleted. But I haven't seen any spam anywhere.

I'm just saying that it can't be solely due to human editing.

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ojbyrne
There is a "showdead" option in your profile (though there might be a minimum
karma required). Then you can see stuff that's been flagged (presumably beyond
some threshold).

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knightinblue
Yeah, I have it turned on and I see the dead articles, but those are more
along the grounds of readers subjectively disagreeing with questionable
ideas/content.

I was talking about never seeing comments/links that are universally agreed
upon as spam, like links to viagra sites etc.

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icey
Well, there's also a question of scale at play. I don't think HN gets enough
visitors yet to make it worthwhile for spammers to target here instead of say,
reddit.

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ojbyrne
I see noticeable amounts of spam in the "New" section. Sometimes anyway.

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pierrefar
I've seen a tiny bit of spam, and usually by the time I refresh the page, it's
gone.

Sometimes in UK morning time, the spam lasts, oooh, 2 minutes instead of the
usual ms. It's even faster these days than a few months ago.

And the community here is very zealous about the quality of submissions, and I
bet a lot of people flag spam promptly.

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rms
One thing that helps is that this is a dumb site to spam. There's no
SEO/traffic benefit from submitting crap here.

