How to handle lots of spam
We've got about 2,000 pending spam comments, mostly as replies to existing threads. First off, congrats for the detection rate. With Tender's recent spam filtering additions, we saw few or no false negatives, and I just skimmed the first few pages of spam and there's no false positives either.
What's the best way to delete these? It would be about 70 pages of Next Page -> Select All -> Delete, and I expect this volume to continue. I'm fine doing that, just wanted to see if there's a better way right now. Thanks.
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31 Posted by Troy on 12 Jan, 2013 05:56 PM
@Richard Regarding reCAPTCHA's effectiveness, I suspect that the number attempts is nowhere near constant day to day, so it's hard (impossible) to say whether it's reCAPTCHA, more attempts, or my best guess, which is just different spammers with more advanced (or manual) techniques.
As an outsider, I think that this problem may be all but unsolvable for your spam load, and you're stuck either getting used to checking it daily or burning a ton of your own time solving it yourself. Neither of these are specific to Tender and I think any internally-operated solution would do worse, aside from being a lot more effort to maintain.
For anyone else reading this ticket: I think the spam detection and handling in Tender is now quite complete. The original reason I opened this ticket has been more than addressed by being able to resolve large batches of flagged spam. The other suggestions (displaying IP address) are entirely nice-to-haves that don't affect the spam detection. Thanks for listening and for the tweaks, ENTP folks.
32 Posted by Julien on 14 Jan, 2013 06:14 PM
Thanks for having the discussion peacefully :)
Spam is definitely an arm race. Our detection rate is pretty good on average, but it's true that when you get a lot of spam, searching for even one false positive in 100 or 200 spam messages can be a daunting and painful task. It would be much better to not have the spam come in the first place, or to at least get rid of the comments we have a very high confidence is spam. We'll keep working on that in the future and I'll keep posting updates here as we deploy new features.
Cheers.
33 Posted by Richard Parslow on 14 Jan, 2013 06:28 PM
Great – thanks for the update.
Richard
34 Posted by Troy on 23 Jan, 2013 08:09 PM
We have a single spammer who keeps getting through, selling the same lead lists. It's a tiny thing, but the subject is predictable and unique enough that we would use a subject-based spam filter if one existed. Such a feature is probably way too niche a need to be worth doing, I'm just adding it here as food for thought.
Troy
35 Posted by Julien on 23 Jan, 2013 08:12 PM
Hi Troy,
You can already do that with filters: you can match on the subject or the body, and choose "mark as spam" as the action. Does the originating email address change every time?
36 Posted by Troy on 23 Jan, 2013 09:44 PM
I totally hadn't seen discussion filters, and it will work great for this.
The originator changes but the subject doesn't much. Thanks!
Troy
37 Posted by Julien on 13 Mar, 2013 05:45 PM
Hi Guys,
Just wanted to notify you that we deployed a significant update to our spam engine yesterday, and you should see a noticeable improvement in the amount of spam you receive.
Let me know how it goes.
38 Posted by Richard Parslow on 13 Mar, 2013 06:14 PM
Hi Julien
Thanks very much – I have already noticed a massive improvement, starting this morning (8 messages in Spam folder instead of 48).
Keep up the good work!
Richard
39 Posted by Richard Parslow on 15 Mar, 2013 12:36 PM
Whatever you are doing is definitely working. Thanks very much for your efforts here.
40 Posted by Julien on 15 Mar, 2013 05:08 PM
Hi Richard,
Glad this made an improvement for you. I'm sure spammers will eventually find a way around our techniques, but we should have some relief for quite a while.
Cheers!
41 Posted by Troy on 16 Mar, 2013 03:43 PM
Hi Julien,
Huge improvement here too. What did you change or start doing?
Troy
Support Staff 42 Posted by Courtenay on 18 Mar, 2013 11:33 AM
it's a professional secret, but we basically modelled all the commenting and reply behavior and found that spammers tend to do a few certain things when they post spam that a regular users do not, and vice versa. So we're able to determine which things are spam much more accurately and can even stop a spammer before they post!
Courtenay closed this discussion on 18 Mar, 2013 11:33 AM.