
Ask.YC: Spammers have finally hit News.YC -- what do we do about them? - pius
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	1 point by 1podgirl 13 minutes ago | discuss<p><i></i><i></i><i></i><i></i>*<p>user:	1podgirl
created:	18 minutes ago
karma:	1
======
fiaz
The simplest technique would be for the YC News gods to grant us a "report
SPAM" button. The site would then be self moderating.

I would also suggest something like granting karma points for sniffing out
SPAM in case the YC News gods agree that a reported link does indeed turn out
to be spam.

Alternatively, a system of "open moderation" would be good as well (to lessen
PG's load). In this case, moderation of the site would fall upon a rotating
schedule between users that have reached a certain level of karma points. Like
jury duty, you have a queue of sites that have been flagged for review, and
the member's job is to merely approve of something as spam or not and have it
dealt with. A link would have to be scrutinized by the random "committee"
(which ideally should be a random percentage of YC News members on a regular
schedule) and a majority vote would determine collectively if a link is spam
or not.

\---------------

Apologies for making this post so long....

1) have a "report" button

2) who ever is on "spam patrol" would see a reported link highlighted

3) "spam patrol" would have their "report" button substituted by a "confirm"
button

4) after enough of the "spam patrol" confirms a link as spam, then the link is
automatically marked for deletion

The advantage of such a system is that there would be some filtration of the
links and spammers would (hopefully) be discouraged.

An "emergent" advantage would be to uncover spam sites. I can even imagine a
number of social sites adopting a scheme creating a collaborative spam filter
(ok, yes I'm spinning this out of control, but what the hell, I'm sure
everybody here thinks like this!). This would be a social solution to a
technical problem.

If reddit had such a system, then a collaboration between YC News and reddit
would pre-emptively eliminate confirmed spam sites from one another. Using
this example, a number of social sites could immediately benefit from an open
database of spam filtering (akin to the use of OpenID). So a confirmed spam
site on reddit would automatically translate into a confirmed spam site on YC
News, or whoever else subscribes to such an open database.

Is this too complex of an idea???

~~~
cstejerean
It's more complex than: add CAPTCHA to create account screen.

~~~
nikiscevak
I run another social news site (realestatevoices.com) and captcha doesn't
help. The people inputing these links are 'SEO' firms based out of India.

Validating email accounts is worthwhile though. But keep in mind these
spammers are actual people not automated in many cases.

~~~
fiaz
interesting site...how long have you been up and running?

------
pg
Spammers hit News.YC the day we launched. There is spam more days than not.
Usually the editors catch these before anyone sees them.

~~~
fiaz
Is spamming much of a problem for the editors?

I suppose I should have asked this when you posted instead of going on my
(useful?) brainstorm below (and I really was just throwing out some ideas)...

~~~
pg
Not huge. There's not a lot of it, and we have several tools for dealing with
it. It was unusual for those spams to sit for 3 hours on the new page without
getting cleaned up.

------
dkokelley
Short term solution: Ban account 1podgirl.

I like the idea of prohibiting posting of articles until karma reaches a
certain threshold, and limiting the amount of comments/hour by karma. So,

for karma < 10 comments/hour = 1

for karma >= 10 comments/hour = karma/10

~~~
pchristensen
Heaven help us when nickb goes sour and hits us with 15 spam articles a
minute!

~~~
iamelgringo
Muahahahaha... MUahahahaha. __* wrings hands evilly __*.

------
rob
What about adding a hidden field to the submission form where if it contains a
value upon submission, it's obviously spam filled in by the bot (if these are
bots and not actual people doing the submitting). Ryan Grove uses this
technique on his blog and said it eliminated a lot of spam:

"Yes. Riposte uses a very simple but very effective form of comment spam
prevention: the comment form contains extra fields that are hidden from normal
browsers via CSS but look like comment fields to spambots. When the form is
submitted, if any of these fields contain content, Riposte denies the request.

This technique has been in use for over a year at wonko.com and has been
effective at stopping virtually all automated comment spam attempts."

~~~
dpapathanasiou
I also use this technique for SeekSift.com (I first saw it on Ned Batchelder's
blog <http://nedbatchelder.com/text/stopbots.html> ), with good results (no
spam bot signups so far).

------
jdavid
what about posts costing you karma?

maybe the post is 1 karma, and each link in the post is an additional karma
point.

if it is a post of value, then you should earn at least more than 1 karma to
replace it.

it makes your post an investment of karma. I think its a good lesson for
entrepreneurs too.

~~~
wastedbrains
I think that is a really interesting idea. The only issue would be if you hit
0 on your first post you could never post again. So if your at 0 you can post
but only once per day or something until you post something that earns you
karma.

It is a simple system but seems like it could be very effective. Kudos

~~~
cstejerean
Best suggestion I've heard so far.

------
jgrahamc
Fundamentally, this sort of spam is about getting links to their sites (first
for direct traffic and second for PageRank).

So, you should attack the links and not the accounts:

0\. Check your URLs against blog spam blacklists. Exclude recently registered
domains (all of the ones mentioned are less than one month old).

1\. Links on stories that have been become popular should be real hyperlinks.

2\. Links on unpopular stories should go through a news.yc redirector (since
this means they don't get PageRank)

3\. Stories that go nowhere (likely spam) have their links removed and a text
version of the link placed next to the story name for anyone who really wants
to follow that link.

4\. A 'spam' button could be handy.

------
mixmax
I was just about to submit an entry on this but you beat me to it :-)

If it persists it should definitely be adressed - one of the great things
about this place is the high signal to noise ratio and I would hate to see
that drop.

But since PG basically invented bayesian spam filtering I am sure that it can
be solved. If he isn't too busy doing arc that that is. ;-)

~~~
hhm
Did he really? I thought he just proposed an improvement to it or something
like that.

~~~
jcl
Wikipedia says that while other people worked on it earlier, PG's essay really
popularized it:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering>

------
yters
I think pg has something in place already, though it takes a little time to
work: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99975>

------
icey
Maybe this is a good time to start allowing negative karma and downvoting of
submissions. If someone has negative karma, then they can't submit until they
start making good comments at least.

I know pg is worried about mass downvoting, and I think a good way around that
is that downvoting anything costs one karma point for the person doing the
downvoting. That way you only downvote things that really deserve it... And if
you're a chronic downvoter, you wouldn't be able to do it for long as you'd
hit Karma 0.

~~~
fiaz
The problem with down-voting is that there is no distinction between a spam
report and judgmental calls on the content of a link. It changes the dynamic
and the quality of links that make it to the top.

Having recently come from reddit (and I must say I absolutely LOVE the energy
of YC News!!!), I noticed that the down-voting makes submission more
competitive and it makes the site less varied and more homogeneous.

~~~
icey
I disagree (to a degree). If enough people want to spend karma on a downvote
then maybe the link doesn't really belong in hacker news anways (I'm looking
at you, XKCD posts).

If a submitter regularly submits garbage, how much different is it than spam?
I mean, if a link is of low quality, maybe it ought to be downvoted & buried.

~~~
fiaz
But the fact that other quality links can be liberally up-voted by others
would prevent low quality links from rising. The only advantage I can see with
the down-voting is that it will make (subjectively) quality links rise faster
and poor links sink faster - but this is not necessarily an advantage, at
least I don't think it is (I could be TOTALLY missing your point here!).

------
edw519
PermissionToSubmit = (Karma > x) * (AccountDaysOld > y)

~~~
fiaz
This would incentivize some of the insidious viral marketers that leverage
social news sites to create fake personas out there and eventually masquerade
submissions for profit... that is if YC News faces the problem of large
numbers.

Also makes YC News elitist as well as shuts out new members, which I think
would defeat the purpose of such a site. Fresh blood helps the mental juices
flow as do varied ideas.

~~~
wastedbrains
you could only be allowed to submit X number of stories a day based on your
Karma... So as you earn some respect you can do more. If you start with 1 you
could only post 1 article a day which would make it less worth while to
spammers.

Or add flagging on users and if it passes some threshold it has the admins
review the account and take action if it really is spam.

Just two thoughts off the top of my head

~~~
fiaz
Some users would get too powerful in the long run. These users would be the
head of a long tail of submissions and could have disproportionate influence.

Of course, this depends upon YC News having the problem of a large user base.
Also, I could be totally wrong in this imagination simulation...

------
jsjenkins168
How about restricting the number of submissions allowed in a given period,
scaled by karma? This would encourage people to only submit meaningful news,
and it would also offer proactive protection against spam from low karma
users. Just a suggestion.

------
DanielBMarkham
When I first started blogging, I wanted people to come read my great words of
wisdom (naturally. Why am I not a god of publishing yet?!?) So I hit on the
idea of tagging my Slashdot posts with a line at the bottom plugging whatever
I was blogging about that day.

I made it a point to post interesting relevant comments to Slashdot, but at
the bottom I would always ham it up with stuff like "Giant Sponge Moon Found
Orbiting Saturn!"

People gave my comments 5 ratings almost all the time, but it really, really
pissed off a group of \\. readers. Was that spam? I'm still not sure the
answer to that question. I know IpodGirl is a spammer, but there are all kinds
of edge cases too.

------
rms
pg's pretty good about killing spammer accounts as they come... if it becomes
a problem, new users could have a probationary period of one approved
submission before their submissions show up. and a reddit style filter on
submission volume below a certain karma would prevent a spammer from filling
up the new page.

------
Kaizyn
We're only in trouble here if PG and the others used to implicitly moderate
traffic are likely to upvote those links. Otherwise, we can safely ignore
them. Adding a 'report submission' button might be prudent as it would make
the process of eliminating junk links more efficient.

------
misterbwong
This was probably mentioned in some form before, but what about a combination
user spam button/automatic temp-ban? If the last X posts by user were marked
as spam, ban account for X days. Two temp bans = perm ban.

------
msteigerwalt
Easiest way is to just ask really simple technical questions in the submission
area as a captcha.

Not sure which technical questions would be 100% answerable to everyone around
here, but it is Hacker News.

~~~
wallflower
Great idea. And not a bad one that would be applicable to CAPTCHAS as a whole.
If non-technical. E.g. ask the user like 'What color is a US Dollar Bill'

~~~
ojbyrne
I've lived in the US, and I had to look at the dollar bills I happen to have
in my wallet. Green, yes, but did they add other colors recently? Not a very
foreigner-friendly question.

The problem with technical questions, is that no matter how simple, people
here will argue about the correct answer ;-). Unless we just give up and say
that "It depends" is always correct.

------
nreece
Btw, is there human moderation at News YC? If not, maybe provide the ability
to the top 10 leaders to delete such spam links.

~~~
danw
Yup, I think pg mentioned before that there's a list of trusted users who can
edit missleading titles, delete posts or change urls. (In the early days pdf
links got changed to scribd links instead by moderators)

------
johnrob
Spam blocking is probably a 1 liner in Arc.

~~~
davidw
"When Arc gets ahold of spam, it turns it into prose worthy of Shakespeare".

"Arc doesn't need to block spam, because spam is too afraid to get anywhere
near Arc".

~~~
kirubakaran
Arc creates classic lit. spam? :-)

<http://www.google.com/search?q=classic+lit+spam>

------
alaskamiller
I don't know... don't vote them up?

------
edu
A captcha on the register screen?

------
andr
negative karma should lead to a user ban.

~~~
thorax
Ouch-- I can't wait until the first YC lynch mobs begin.

