Discobot tutorial flagged as spam

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Hi Ryan,

So, while I wasn’t able to fully reproduce this behavior, likely due to a spam-check job that runs at a certain time, here is what I believe happened:

  • The site setting newuser_spam_host_threshold is defaulted to 3. The description of this setting is:

    How many times a new user can post a link to the same host within their newuser_spam_host_threshold posts before being considered spam.

    When digging into the code a little, it looks like this does not apply to PMs, so it does not appear that the tutorial itself would trigger the flagging.

  • At 9:41am the System user flagged 4 posts at once for the user in question. Each flag had the same message:

    This new user tried to create multiple posts with links to the same domain (<link>). See the newuser_spam_host_threshold site setting.

    Between the first two flagged posts (non-tutorial posts), a link to the same host appears 3 times, thus hitting the threshold.

  • The other two flags listed are from the discobot tutorial, but are referring to the naturally posted links (wikipedia and image) and have not met the threshold under this user.

  • Main Suspicion: When a user breaks the spam host threshold, ALL posts (including PMs) where they have included links are included to make sure they are dealt with if they are confirmed a spammer.

So technically speaking, I think it’s doing what was intended. It looks like you’ve configured white_listed_spam_host_domains with some common hosts, but if you keep getting false-positives, you could try raising the newuser_spam_host_threshold sightly and bring it back down if there are any issues.

Let me know if you need any more information.

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