Ask PG: Spam Control on HN | Hacker News Reader

Ask PG: Spam Control on HN

7 pointsknightinblue17 comments

Given HN's incredibly easy signup process (not even a CAPTCHA), one would think that spammers would be going crazy in here. But I haven't seen a single bit of spam, either in the comments or new articles lineup.

How is this achieved? I mean what kind of spam filters?

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IP, site, and account bans catch maybe 80% of spam. The rest gets killed by human editors.

Got it. Thanks Paul :)

is there a pre-built list of IPs and sites available somewhere? it just seems to be easier than building a list from scratch...

From an old post,

List of banned sites and why are they banned? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498910

i, and probably many other people, flag anything that looks like spam.

so does a comment/article immediately get deleted when someone clicks 'flag'? or does it get sent to the moderators for review?

If it's the latter, I thought I'd still see the comment/article till it's deleted. But I haven't seen any spam anywhere.

I'm just saying that it can't be solely due to human editing.

There is a "showdead" option in your profile (though there might be a minimum karma required). Then you can see stuff that's been flagged (presumably beyond some threshold).

Yeah, I have it turned on and I see the dead articles, but those are more along the grounds of readers subjectively disagreeing with questionable ideas/content.

I was talking about never seeing comments/links that are universally agreed upon as spam, like links to viagra sites etc.

Well, there's also a question of scale at play. I don't think HN gets enough visitors yet to make it worthwhile for spammers to target here instead of say, reddit.

It's also harder to get follow links here than at reddit.

I see noticeable amounts of spam in the "New" section. Sometimes anyway.

Admins here are amazing. Distributed responsibility, easy to see flagging, and an active user set all help the keep spam to a minimum.

So no comment spam filters like akismet or anything?

Then I'm incredibly impressed at the effectiveness. I just thought that since HN has the same basic functionality as reddit, it must have a far better set of spam filters than reddit.

Comment spam will get downvoted to hell. And the current users of HN care about the quality of HN. :)

I've seen a tiny bit of spam, and usually by the time I refresh the page, it's gone.

Sometimes in UK morning time, the spam lasts, oooh, 2 minutes instead of the usual ms. It's even faster these days than a few months ago.

And the community here is very zealous about the quality of submissions, and I bet a lot of people flag spam promptly.

One thing that helps is that this is a dumb site to spam. There's no SEO/traffic benefit from submitting crap here.

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