

Remind HN: Go to Noobstories, flag spam - sorbus
http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

======
dschobel
Yikes, 2 out of every 3 submissions (as of right now, at least) are [dead].

This may be a problem which requires a procedural solution rather than the
goodwill volunteerism of HNers.

~~~
pg
Don't worry, that's normal. Low, in fact, because this is a weekend.

There are already such solutions, and those are what killed most of these
submissions. But I'm happy to have humans helping out too.

~~~
tomjen3
Jesus.

Can't you make hn links non-follow? At least of the newbies?

~~~
icey
Links under a certain karma threshold are marked nofollow. I think the
criteria is 4 or 5 karma.

~~~
_delirium
Doesn't seem to deter a large proportion of spammers, either--- I guess
spamming is cheap enough that you might as well shotgun it, instead of
bothering to research each site's nofollow policies. If you ever look at
Slashdot's submission queue, there's a ton of spam in there too, despite the
fact that it gets pretty quickly buried, is nofollowed on a robots.txt-
prohibited page that not even many humans visit, and has no chance of being
posted by the manual story-posting process.

~~~
pg
Actually most individual spammers learn fairly quickly that spamming HN
doesn't work. At any given time the spammers are mostly new arrivals.

~~~
thinkbohemian
Robots.txt

User-Agent: * Disallow: /x? Disallow: /vote? Disallow: /reply? Disallow:
/submitted? Disallow: /submitlink? Disallow: /threads?

~~~
sorbus
One assumes that a core characteristic of spammers and spambots is that they
ignore Robots.txt - or at least I would be extremely surprised if disallowing
them in robots.txt has any effect.

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petercooper
Why not restrict submissions to users with over, say, 10 karma? Only a tiny
subset of spammers would write comments to get over that hurdle (though it
would only take a couple of reasonable ones). Has this been discussed
extensively before?

~~~
sprout
That makes anonymous posting difficult to do without degrading the quality of
the site.

~~~
robryan
I wonder if a post anonymous button would work or would it just lead to an
overuse of anonymous posting. Something reasonable would be to restrict it to
1 anonymous topic a week and only anonymous replies in that single topic.

------
taitems
Is there a list of all the hidden HN pages located somewhere? There appear to
be a few pages that you can't get to in your top navigation bar, eg:

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories>

\- <http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments>

~~~
aresant
Look at the bottom left of the page - left most menu says "lists" and takes
you to <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists>

------
lotharbot
Related: go to noobcomments [0] and downvote trolls and spammers, and give
upvotes and thoughtful responses to those who deserve them.

[0] <http://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments>

------
gte910h
I do not understand

~~~
vibhavs
Noobstories contains links posted from newly-created user accounts. The
category is intended for moderation and tends to have more spam than others -
the OP is asking you to flag spam articles on Noobstories to maintain the
overall high-quality of HN.

~~~
PCheese
How does one "flag as spam"? I don't see any such links on either the article
discussion page or the user page.

Example: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652503>

~~~
bbatsell
You need to have a certain amount of karma to flag, but if I recall it's
fairly low.

~~~
sorbus
It's around 50, I think.

------
wealthyox
I never knew there was so much spam. I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader
/ lurker than a spammer.

~~~
jacquesm
> I'm a noob here but I'm more of a reader / lurker than a spammer.

The fact that you write this more or less already proves your point. Spammers
would not engage in conversation (at least, not normally).

~~~
tomjen3
It would seem then, that the solution would be to ban new postings by users
who don't have at least 10 karma.

~~~
jacquesm
That would also drop a lot of really nice stuff. Plenty of people start their
lives on HN as the posters of an article.

------
charliepark
I'm sure the scenarios and solutions have been thought through, but this is an
issue that frustrates me, especially in the mornings, when activity is
lighter, and there's a higher noise-to-signal ratio. (Or maybe that's just
when I notice it more.) I flag what I can, and I'm sure the automated filters
do catch most (per PG's comment), but there seems to be a really easy way to
combat most of this:

1\. accounts need to be active for X days before they can comment (at all) 2\.
accounts need to have a karma score over Y to submit posts

Wouldn't that resolve most of these stories?

~~~
oconnore
#1: No, increasing the latency of the time it takes to post spam has nothing
to do with the throughput.

#2: Probably not a good idea. It's very hard to get lots of karma from
comments alone, and you start to cut in on actually useful posts, like a new
founder posting a link to his/her company at launch.

~~~
petercooper
Re #2, it'd only take even needing 4 or 5 karma to dissuade the majority of
spammers. And hard? The majority of my > 10k karma comes from comments -
possibly even over 90%.

It's not far fetched to expect people to have posted one or two comments a
couple of people vote up before being able to submit and it'd decimate this
problem.

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ez77
It would help to have the "noobstories" header on the main HN page. Only after
typing in the URL <http://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories> is that header
visible.

------
jbellis
how are we supposed to find the noobstories link normally?

~~~
MarkSweep
At the bottom of the page there is a "lists" link. noobstories is listed
there.

------
hellrich
Related to quality: Is there any possibility to filter the RSS feed?

