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The Frustration Loop
31–40 of 158 posts
Re: The Frustration Loop
#32The best spam protection I ever had, was a bunch of hidden text input fields on my mail contact form, with names like “blindcopy”, “bcc”, “cc”, “additional address”, etc. They all had default values. If the submitting handler detected any values in these fields that were different from the default, the submission was rejected. I don’t think I ever got a single bogus email from that form.
I've heard this concept described as a "honeypot field" before and it works pretty well as you've said. I'm curious how password managers/autofill avoid tripping up though; are they able to detect that the field is not visible?
Password managers typically only fill specified fields - username & password - and leave others alone.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#33> somehow I don't think they read my blog
But they read Hacker News....
Re: The Frustration Loop
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Akismet detect spammers when they sign up? afaik its main feature is an API to detect whether a given comment is spam: https://akismet.com/developers/comment-check/
In the gif, the user already has a login and is attempting to make a post. I imagine either the user gets flagged as a spammer or each individual post might.
In the gif I see, they’re signing up for a new site, and are asked to create a login in the 2nd step.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#35We've found that rolling our own spam model can be very effective (especially at improving precision). Many sites have their own quirks around what material counts as spam which leads to false positives or negatives wherever your site differs from the norm. No need to go to GPT4 though. We've found even low compute algorithms like random forest perform quite well at the task. You do have to create your own training set, but even a few hundreds or thousands of manually sorted examples can work pretty well.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#36A pre-existing term for this is tarpit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking)
Re: The Frustration Loop
#37A pre-existing term for this is tarpit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking)
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Re: The Frustration Loop
#38Do you sample the content put into 'frustration' users and see if it's actually legit? Do you have a false positive / false negative rate? Have you seen your total legit signup count go down or up?
You're not the only one to do this, many pages do it whenever you do a vpn, they fail in silent and annoying ways not displaying any errors or otherwise. Turn off the vpn and everything magically starts working. Etsy for a long time would return blank pages if you were on VPNs. Extremely irritating.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#39I think the key here is when you detect that someone is in a bad category, you shouldn't alert them to the fact you know that, because then it just becomes an arms race. Another approach might be to make it look to them like they managed to create their blog, but just quarantine the content so no one else can ever see it.
The author mentions that they were basically already doing that by no-indexing the content. Plus, that can end up costing you more money hosting the quarantined content.
Re: The Frustration Loop
#40This reminds me of one of my former ESPN co-workers - Mike Davidson[1] - who founded of one of the first community news sites (Newsvine[2]) back in 2006. Newsvine had comments and upvotes and link submissions and posts - it was very reddit-esque except it was focused around the news. The team had to have a way to deal with spammers and trolls. They found the most effective way was to flag a user as a troll on the New…
By that standard, I think that the new Reddit mobile UI must consider everyone a troll.