A forum should be monitored and moderated, ideally 7/24, or at least once in 24 hours. As I always have the page open, I try to flag spam/wrong posts, but they never end and I’m not sure they are handled correctly/in a timely fashion.
With today’s spam (and somewhat inappropriate) posts, I started to flag them and I’ve got this:
So, we have: No limits for spam, but rate-limit on community moderation.
Very frustrating!
Agreed.
I have just gone through and flagged up a lot of new posts as spam as well so hopefully that helps.
I would like to see Discourse tidied up (to reduce the surface area) and use trusted contributors as admin/moderators (like we do with Matrix) to help manage it.
Discourse is a really useful resource for both contributors and communities at Mozilla,
FTR I have administrative privileges on some parts, and on monday it was like 42 messages I had to review, never seen that much. I pinged people on Discourse.
In the meantime, I believe we could have many more volunteer admins on various parts of the discourse to remove them faster and ease the loading on staff
Thank you @lissyx, there were more spam posts than actual posts under Common Voice, now they are gone. BUT, I was away for an hour, and here is the view:
Exactly… I think I have some level of moderator rights here because I moderate Turkish sub-forum. I can edit spam posts, I deleted contents of some very inappropriate posts or posts with dangerous links in the past, but usually leave them as they are for the administrators to see the content. But I don’t know what happens after that. They create multiple accounts, post many junk across many projects/areas in 10 minutes and disappear.
I used to moderate/administer tens of different forums since 1990’s, there are many different methods to prevent these, up to disabling an IP range for a period of time - there should be some policies for it. But you have to invest the time to do it. Currently, even the discourse admins e-mail is not working (last month there was an error which possibly required a server restart, I could not reach anybody, I finally posted an issue on a related GitHub repo assuming somebody is maintaining it).
In CV, we had Language Representatives in the past, who are perfect candidates for such moderation I think. They passed a kind of recruitment procedure as volunteers.
Discourse had excellent spam prevention rules and tools, such as removing spammers with all posts in one button. I manage two discourse forums for my office, and most of the time, we don’t need to spend more than minutes each day to review a few flagged posts by either system moderate or flagged by users. We probably need to 1) upgrade to the latest version and 2) assign a few moderators to each category, and then it would be fine.
In the meantime, although I cannot flag them as spam due to rate-limiting, I found out that I can un-list the the posts… This is what I’ll be doing in flood cases.
Discourse had excellent spam prevention rules and tools
@irvin, I never administered a Discourse forum, are there settings for rate-limiting / auto-flagging users who post many times in a given period? And can you change the rate-limit for flagging done by moderators?
