Perhaps this isn’t new, as I’ve only been on Lemmy for around 3 months, but up until this point I hadn’t noticed spam, advertising, scams, etc at all on Lemmy. However, within the last 2 days I’ve seen at least 3 examples of obvious spam posts, made by accounts clearly dedicated to that purpose. Has anyone else noticed this? And are there steps we could take to counter it (perhaps a report button)?

  • m-p{3}@lemmy.ml
    13·
    3 years ago

    Every platform that becomes popular eventually ends up being spammed.

    My suggestion would be some kind of filter that keeps track of several metrics related to the domain name linked, ie how often the domain name is part of reports, how recently the domain name has been registered, etc and if the link seems untrustworthy, have the submission or comment filtered and require a manual approval by the community mod(s) before it shows up for everyone else.

    And personally I’d auto-block any URL shorteners services, they don’t serve a valid purpose here and can be used to hide the destination URL.

  • gun@lemmy.ml
    10·
    3 years ago

    I found it kind of funny first. This site is a smaller forum filled with people who are interested in privacy and security and are generally tech literate enough to spot a scam. Not sure what they hope to gain over doing this on a bigger website, but it’s interesting we are on these people’s radar.

    • ClassicallyCommie@lemmy.mlOP
      4·
      3 years ago

      I could be wrong, but I was under the impression that Lemmy doesn’t keep track of user karma. Perhaps it does internally but doesn’t display it in the ui? Otherwise, this sounds like a good suggestion.

      • gun@lemmy.ml
        6·
        3 years ago

        Karma is kept track of on the back end. But Lemmy ui doesn’t show it. It’s in the API tho.

      • Jesse@lemmy.ml
        5·
        3 years ago

        The code for total user karma is in the backend, but just isn’t utilized in this instance. You absolutely can access it though.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
    4·
    3 years ago

    Outside of other solutions ppl proposed below, we do just need more active admins, across different timezones. The report queue has really helped, but there’s not enough of us looking at them.

    Cleaning things up only takes a few seconds with the ban + remove content action.

    Also a lot of these spam posts do seem automated, which means our captcha here isn’t doing as good a job as it should be 😞

  • k_o_t@lemmy.ml
    2·
    3 years ago

    prly bc i was away 😎

    seriously though, there’s been a ton more spam the last few weeks, i guess that’s the price you pay for more users 🤷‍♀️

  • AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml
    1·
    3 years ago

    Just a quick reminder to users: if you see spam, simply commenting “spam” or downvoting it doesn’t alert the mods. It’s best to hit the report button and/or comment directly mentioning the mods of the community or the admins of the instance where the post originates from.

    If you report the offending post to the admins of another instance (Lemmy.ml sees this a lot since we one of the biggest instances), they can only remove and ban on their own instance, whereas the home instance admins can ban the account from posting at all, and if they remove it, it should propagate through to the federated instances.

  • CHEF-KOCH@lemmy.ml
    06·
    3 years ago

    Define spam, advertising, scams, etc.

    Practical everything is an ad, info or notice what you post because you want to make people aware of things. There are some ads here, but they’re quickly getting reported. I reported myself lots of things already, it is normal.

    Maybe link the examples or report them, otherwise this is hard to understand what you exactly mean.

    Edit

    Down-vote after 3 seconds, wow…

    • QuentinCallaghan@sopuli.xyz
      6·
      3 years ago

      This is a good example of spam: an account makes several posts like these to wrong communities. The post is a blatant ad for some assignment help website with link included (of course I didn’t put the whole post here).

      • CHEF-KOCH@lemmy.ml
        61·
        3 years ago

        Yeah, this is sadly something that will never be entirely fixed in social media. Twitter fights this by enforcing a telephone number to avoid bot posts and even then there are ways to bypass it.

        Just report it and hope the mods, admins see that and ban such people, I think those are bot accounts.

        • ClassicallyCommie@lemmy.mlOP
          2·
          3 years ago

          I wasn’t aware there already was a report button, guess I should have checked before posting :/ Hopefully reporting it for admins to handle should be enough to counter the problem for now. For that solution to scale well as Lemmy grows, I’d imagine Lemmy would have to expand by adding new instances that each stay relatively small rather than consolidating users on a handful of instances, otherwise large instances would be overrun by spam without more drastic measures in place.

          • LLVMcompile@lemmy.ml
            3·
            3 years ago

            The bots are custom made, because there is no nofollow attribute. 90% of the spam will basically disappear if and when its implemented (from experience running web blogs)

          • CHEF-KOCH@lemmy.ml
            05·
            3 years ago

            I came up with a proposal to restrict communities bases on some conditions, account age, overall posts etc. They said they look into it.

            This would be the only way to prevent spam without enforcing phone number.

      • Jesse@lemmy.ml
        1·
        3 years ago

        Hey there, I’ve been thinking about this picture for some reason ever since I saw it. What are you using to interface with lemmy? Is this a terminal-based browser? Is it just custom css? What’s going on here?