

Data.gov.uk overrun by spammers - andybak
http://data.gov.uk/ideas/national-rail-timetable-data

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antonioacuna
Everyone,

Thanks for the concern.

we are aware of the situation and have stopped anonymous posting to the site
for now so we can at least fac the task of cleanup,we are cleaning it as fast
as we can while doing a thousand other things preparing for the re-launch of
the site towards the end of this month. It is unfortunate that we will have to
eliminate anonymous posting in the future until we find a sustainable way to
automate as much of the moderation process as possible.

Sadly, a lot of the spam has been done by registered users with, well, fake
accounts, we are eliminating those as well but as you can see from the sheer
amount of spam, it would require a full time post just to keep it clean, let
alone doing proper moderation of legit comments.

Please know that we do continuously work on the site and although we have
limited resources, we are working as hard as we can and the new site
functionality will hopefully be evidence of that.

Antonio Acuña Head of Data.gov.uk

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redslazer
Simply setting links as nofollow and using a simple captcha would eliminate
most of the problem.

~~~
jerico2day
Might I also recommend akismet which is quite good at filtering spam and is
very simple to setup. Also, just disallow more than a couple links from
anonymous comments.

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anons2011
Askismet?

Do they not at least moderate all the comments first?!

 _< a
href="///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/zxm/%E6%A1%8C%E9%9D%A2/%E9%94%9A%E6%96%87%E6%9C%AC6-2">_

Oops, silly spammer.

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Nux
Shame on the people maintaining the site, nothing is "set it and leave it" any
more or it gets heavily abused.

~~~
weego
This was always a major issue when I worked closely with the Dept for
Education, namely everything was stipulated as having a budget that ran to
Date X exactly but there was an insistence that there be a digital aspect to
everything that could function as a "legacy" for the project with no concept
that systems need administration/hosting/support/backups/etc.

Now I am not saying that the blame is singularly with the Dept or with
suppliers, just that neither fully understood that the digital offering had to
either augment an ongoing human business process, or an ongoing human business
process had to have ownership of the digital offering in an ongoing capacity.
This is pretty much an unsolvable problem when you address the other issue
that funding is always cut at Date X.

In this case though I assume funding is ongoing so it's a case of no one being
assigned ownership of moderation (or rather ongoing moderation was not a
primary concern of their goal).

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owenboswarva
'On the issue of spam in data.gov.uk' by AAcuna (data.gov.uk)
<http://data.gov.uk/blog/on-the-issue-of-spam-in-datagovuk>

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tomelders
Let's all take a moment to be honest with each other. Accidents happen.

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excuse-me
Why on earth put comments on a data feed for railway timetables?

I'm sensing somebody being told to make the data "new and interactive" and
"customer-focused" and "responsive to customer need dynamics". I suspect the
bastard phrase "a dialogue with stakeholders" reared it's ugly head

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It's not a data feed. It's an idea someone's submitted, of course people can
comment on it.

~~~
misterbwong
^^ This BUT they should have done it properly. At the very least they should
have added nofollow to all links in user populated fields. IMO they should
remove outside linking altogether and cut the spammers off.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Web developers make oversights. The important thing is that they come back to
correct them.

