Spam Cleanup Coordination

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Hey all! There’s a lot of spam in the old comments here.

Thankfully, Discourse makes it possible for us to clean it up, even when @codinghorror is asleep!

Follow these steps to help out:

  1. Achieve Trust Level 1
    All you need for this is to spend a little bit of time reading. Click the logo in the upper left, pick a topic from the past, and Read The Comments!
    You’ll know that you’re done when you stop seeing the Top page as your homepage. You can still get back there by clicking in the navigation bar.
  2. Search for the spam posts
    I’ve found that the most effective search term so far is a href. Ignore the thread “URL Shortening: Hashes in practice”, because that turns up one person that posted a lot of URLs as code.
  3. Click Flag, Spam on the spam
    As soon as 3 people do this, it gets hidden and is added to the admin’s flag queue for them to delete for good.

Happy hunting!

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Thanks for this!

When you get to trust level 1 (protip: reading is all it takes), you’ll notice a flag button appears on every post.

Just flag things that need cleanup and I can deal with them. We tried to make this as easy as we could.

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Yaaaay, flagging spam, my favorite pastime :stuck_out_tongue: (well, haven’t done that for a while, but still).

Always pleasant to be able to fix such things on a forum, instead of seeing it crumble under the spambots.

Edit: apparently I’ll stop on the way, there’s a “limit to the actions I can do today”.
Oh well.

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If a particular topic is bad and has lots of spam, just flag the whole topic (via the flag button at the bottom of the topic) and I’ll walk the topic as needed. That can be more effective and easier than flagging individual posts.

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For now it was mostly 1-2 per post. You had a wave of such posts around september-october 2011, for some reason (hence most of the blog comment posts having update then)

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Well. Isn’t that ironical.

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Spam on this very topic!

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