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Recently in GDSE the spam increased a lot; there is company or person who is spamming about keto diet all the time; I flagged and downvoted a lot but isn't there any other way to stop this?

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    Posting a screenshot of the spam here is not really a good thing, since now the spammer has something to show to their employer (and somebody might actually buy that stuff). I will remove the link and have the questions history redacted. You do not need to do anything (except avoiding to repeat that mistake).
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Apr 19, 2019 at 9:26
  • @Wrzlprmft sorry will keep that in mind :) thanks for the reply
    – Mr.Online
    Apr 19, 2019 at 9:44
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    Related, if not duplicate: graphicdesign.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3115/19174
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Apr 19, 2019 at 9:49
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    Are there companies? Yes, most likely. Based on the long-term effort, someone is definitely paid for it. GDSE isn't the only site affected though: the entire network is to some degree. Keep flagging though, and Spam Ram (SE's built in spam filter) will eventually start blocking some of it, along with IPs. SmokeDetector (spam detection bot, not affiliated with SE) will also pick up most of it and result in auto-flags to get it off the site quicker. Beyond that, there's not really much to do about it.
    – Zoe
    Apr 19, 2019 at 10:12
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    @Zoe i'm already happy with the results cuz even in less than 3 minutes or so it's being deleted already ^^
    – Mr.Online
    Apr 19, 2019 at 10:31
  • You can read about autoflagging here, feel free to pop into Charcoal HQ chat room with any questions.
    – Welz
    Apr 19, 2019 at 16:37

1 Answer 1

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Thanks for your concern Design Phoenix. Spam can be very annoying and potentially hurtful to the site and the community.

Luckily, we have some automated tools at our disposal to deal with spam. These tools look for bad keywords, bad urls, blacklisted sites, etc. Keto and Diet are definitely among those keywords.

We actually have a chat room where this automated system posts everything that is automatically flagged as spam: The Spam Blot. As you can see, it's quite a lot, more than any one person could deal with.

If you want a more in-depth analysis of the automated anti-spam activity, you can find a dashboard here. It looks as though the amount of spam has not really increased over the past three months.

enter image description here

One thing to note though is that the time to deletion has increased somewhat during the past weeks. This might be due a lessened user activity overall (maybe because of the Easter Holidays?). This might explain why the users that are still active, are seeing more of the spam.

enter image description here

This is definitely something we do need to keep an eye on. I'm guessing the Time to deletion will go down by itself again once user activity picks up. But if it doesn't, we'll maybe have to look into taking additional steps.

PS: There's no need to downvote spam. Flagging automatically does this. And once an answer is deleted, the change in rep is removed with it.

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    See this for the reason of the recent increase in deletion times.
    – Wrzlprmft Mod
    Apr 19, 2019 at 9:58
  • Thanks @Wrzlprmft. So the deletion times should go down automatically if SE stops blocking those IP's...
    – PieBie Mod
    Apr 19, 2019 at 10:01
  • It's good to see that we have already anti spam system here :) marked as solved
    – Mr.Online
    Apr 19, 2019 at 10:05
  • I think you meant the time to deletion has increased
    – iBug
    Apr 21, 2019 at 11:30
  • yes, edited. Thanks for the heads-up @iBugDesign
    – PieBie Mod
    Apr 23, 2019 at 10:09
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    Could I suggest replacing The Spam Blot's link with the transcript link? This means those that don't wish to do so aren't automatically joining the room.
    – doppelgreener
    Apr 24, 2019 at 21:37
  • @doppelgreener good idea, I went ahead and did it.
    – Welz
    Apr 25, 2019 at 20:22
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    What if i want to post a design question for a keto diet flyer ;)
    – joojaa
    Jun 6, 2019 at 9:30

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