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Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#11
It's just not big enough of a target for typical spam. For your case, if it's real people that you're having a problem with then you'd be well served to just put up a big warning against off topic posts and advertisements.

You could rely on the users to moderate, but then you get-inconsistent moderation with no one accountable for false positives.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#12
post #5

I think a lot of it also has to do with the community itself. A site of this size would probably get 300-400 spam messages a day if it weren't for the fact that it's audience would see right through it. Tech people are so concious of Spam that they ignore it out of principle which means spamming a tech site pointless. As for suggestions... 1. Obviously CAPTCHA. It just makes sense 2. I find keyword blocking very effe…

Part 2 sounds powerful but it would make the submission process less simple and maybe less user friendly for new users.

Well you'd only do it on words that are almost certainly spam. Like Viagra or male impotence or...well, you get the picture. It works on the theory of "this word would almost never be used legitimately in a post so it's almost certainly spam"

I use this on my mail server and with 200 users I've yet to ever get a false positive.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#13
post #5

I think a lot of it also has to do with the community itself. A site of this size would probably get 300-400 spam messages a day if it weren't for the fact that it's audience would see right through it. Tech people are so concious of Spam that they ignore it out of principle which means spamming a tech site pointless. As for suggestions... 1. Obviously CAPTCHA. It just makes sense 2. I find keyword blocking very effe…

Part 2 sounds powerful but it would make the submission process less simple and maybe less user friendly for new users.

Have you checked to see if you can use cookies or IPs to track spammers? You should be able to find some common trait, unless it's all generic bots and bots are easy to defeat.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#14
post #6

The sites most vulnerable to spam are ones that a) have a critical mass of readership, especially dumb readership that will click on ridiculous spam links, and b) ones not run by people who are active contributors to the field of spam filtering.

i cant see how not being an active contributor to the field of spam filtering make your site vulnerable to spammers. Not be vigilant against spammers yes, but you don't need to be in the industry to combat this problem. the dumb readership comment speaks for itself, lets get off the high horse bro.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#15
post #5

I think a lot of it also has to do with the community itself. A site of this size would probably get 300-400 spam messages a day if it weren't for the fact that it's audience would see right through it. Tech people are so concious of Spam that they ignore it out of principle which means spamming a tech site pointless. As for suggestions... 1. Obviously CAPTCHA. It just makes sense 2. I find keyword blocking very effe…

I don't see how captchas "just make sense", especially in the most common image-based incarnation. I have worked with visually impaired people and the most popular request was always "I want to something on this website, but they have a captcha I can't see (and occasionally an audio captcha that makes no sense), can you sign me up/comment for me/do whatever task?".

As a sighted person, I've even run across captchas that were impossible to decipher, both from some third party solution and from something like recaptcha, the latter which bothers me to no end because sometimes both words are ambiguous.

Whether or not they make sense depends on your audience and your site and your implementation of it.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#17
post #14
post #6

The sites most vulnerable to spam are ones that a) have a critical mass of readership, especially dumb readership that will click on ridiculous spam links, and b) ones not run by people who are active contributors to the field of spam filtering.

i cant see how not being an active contributor to the field of spam filtering make your site vulnerable to spammers. Not be vigilant against spammers yes, but you don't need to be in the industry to combat this problem. the dumb readership comment speaks for itself, lets get off the high horse bro.

I think the point was merely that pg has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem of spam (it's one of the things he's famous for), he also wrote the software that runs HN, and when those two facts combine you end up with software that has many mechanisms for automatically preventing spam. It's just that being involved in the fight against spam means his site probably makes use of more cutting edge techniques than sites built by folks who have never dealt with spam before. HN probably also has a much higher "editor to submitter" ratio than most sites, and so a human that has privileges needed to kill spam usually sees it long before it hits the front page.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#18

Pretty much every site with user generated content is overwhelmed with people trying to post spam. For my site, I use a combination of javascript human detection, bayesian filtering, and aggressive human intervention (including single click "spam this" links on every piece of content when logged in as an Admin) It's worth noting that since late 2007, a significant portion of comment spam is human powered. CAPTCHA sty…

Sounds like a good business opportunity.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#19
post #5

I think a lot of it also has to do with the community itself. A site of this size would probably get 300-400 spam messages a day if it weren't for the fact that it's audience would see right through it. Tech people are so concious of Spam that they ignore it out of principle which means spamming a tech site pointless. As for suggestions... 1. Obviously CAPTCHA. It just makes sense 2. I find keyword blocking very effe…

Thanks a bunch for your excellent suggestions. I'll look into them.

Re: Ask YC: How come spammers are not attacking YC News?

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part 2 sounds powerful but it would make the submission process less simple and maybe less user friendly for new users.

Well you'd only do it on words that are almost certainly spam. Like Viagra or male impotence or...well, you get the picture. It works on the theory of "this word would almost never be used legitimately in a post so it's almost certainly spam" I use this on my mail server and with 200 users I've yet to ever get a false positive.

> I use this on my mail server and with 200 users > I've yet to ever get a false positive.

How do you know? I don't see how you would measure that; if you can figure out it is a false positive, you have discovered a better filter. You might get user complaints, but the absence of user complaints doesn't prove you have no false positives. (Although the presence of user complains could prove that you do.)

Also: The assertion that everything to do with viagra is spam makes it very difficult to have a discussion about viagra or spam. For example, this posting would be rejected.

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