Hey guys, don’t have to approve this, just don’t know how better to contact you to bring this to your attention. The forum’s SPAM threshold is too tight. This is the second time this week I’ve had a post in the unmoderated forums flagged for SPAM that was not SPAM. Interestingly, both times I was flagged on editing a post, so it seems to strangely be counting edits as well as posts in whatever SPAM threshold you guys have set. It would be a much better experience for us it if this were eased up a bit, as well as save you guys time in having to go and approve false positives. Thanks!
Thanks for letting us know. We recently had to tighten them up because of overwhelming amounts of spam coming in. I’ll alert our web guy to see if there’s anything else we can do.
Thanks Austin! As a software engineer, I will say that this is something that is very common. There is an endless battle between security and usability. Something like this is “nuanced” because if you go too restrictive like it is now, you get a ton of false positives and it becomes a burden to the legit users of the site. But too loose and you get tons of false negatives and lots of spam. One alternatives would be incorporating Re-Captcha. I wouldn’t do it on an every post basis as that would be obnoxious, but it could be implemented something like on a users first post (or even something like first 10 posts a user makes to make it difficult for a bot to just keep creating new accounts), and then after that if a user say makes something like 15 posts in a 10 minute time frame have them do a Re-Captcha test instead of blocking the user from the thread automatically. Then if they fail the Re-Captcha you alert moderators and suspend the users account temporarily, if they pass the Re-Captcha they can carry on. There is no perfect solution, but there are ways to make it more difficult for SPAM bots without throwing too much of the burden on the legit users, and of course, you guys .
How does on see if something was marked as spam? I posted a thread a few days ago and it has remained unapproved, could it have been marked as spam or do they occasionally approve and answer questions out of order?
We occasionally approve/answer things out of order, and this has been an exceptionally busy weekend as we are at a seminar, have all of our clients check-ins and programming to write, and lots of template questions.