People editing posts into spam

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AI-generated summary

A discussion is taking place about how to handle users editing their posts into spam on a customer support forum. bombledmonk shared an instance where a user edited their post eight days later with a Vietnamese gambling site, which wasn’t caught for nearly two months.

Suggestions to combat this behavior include limiting the time allowed to edit a post pfaffman, dax, and setting a time limit through the post edit time limit site setting. DeanMarkTaylor recommends using the Discourse Moderator Attention plugin, which highlights modified posts for moderators.

Others suggest running edits through Akismet, especially if the edit occurs after several days and the user has a low trust level cpradio, codinghorror. eviltrout mentions that implementing this change might not be too difficult.

However, codinghorror notes that instead of implementing this change, trust level based edit time limits were introduced, with lower trust levels having shorter allowed edit windows. Stephen and bombledmonk share concerns that wiki edit spam is still a problem, but codinghorror questions the severity of the issue due to a lack of evidence.

1

So this is a “How would you handle it?” question.

I have a customer support forum and had a person come on the forum and post a very legitimate question, the question was promptly answered and the post was buried as is natural. Eight days later this person came back and edited his post replacing the contents with a Vietnamese gambling site, but it wasn’t caught for a nearly 2 months. Since this wasn’t the last post, the thread didn’t get bumped and brought to anyone’s attention. Does anyone have ideas on how one might combat or keep on top of this type of behavior?

2

That’s a very clever and devoted spammer!

You might reduce the time allowed to edit a post.

3

The simplest thing that comes to mind is limiting the number of minuts available to edit your post by modifying the site setting post edit time limit.

4

There is a specific plugin that would handle this situation:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse-moderator-attention

I believe it works like this:
Modifications / new posts on the end bump the visibility of the topic in the topic list and once a moderator has read the post it would return to it’s original position and no longer be highlighted for moderators.

Regardless of me perhaps being incorrect about the movement in position at least it’s highlighted with an asterisk for moderators.

Official description:

Discourse Moderator Attention

This plugin was designed for heavily moderated sites, once installed we track which moderator read which post and when.

Any unmoderated topics (topics with at least 1 unmoderated post) will be displayed in the topic list with and asterisk for moderators only.

5

Food for Thought:
Do edits run through Akismet? Should they? Especially if the edit happened after several days and the User is TL 1 or less?

6

Good question! @eviltrout I think TL0 edits should go through Akismet but this might be a big change?

7

I took a peek at the code I wrote and it seems like it wouldn’t be an awful amount of work to add a new state of edited and have it go through Akismet. The time consuming part is testing it to make sure it all works as expected. I’m a bit busy right now but probably someone else on the team could handle that.

9

이 변경사항이 실제로 적용되었나요? 위키 편집 스팸은 여전히 큰 문제입니다.

10

아니요, 대신 우리는 신뢰 수준에 기반한 편집 시간 제한을 적용했습니다. 따라서 TL0과 TL1 사용자는 기본적으로 훨씬 짧은 편집 허용 기간, 즉 24시간만 사용할 수 있습니다. TL2 사용자는 30일을 사용할 수 있습니다.

11

자, 그러면 위키 편집 스팸에 대한 완화 조치가 지금 있는 건가요?

12

이것이 심각한 문제인가요? 제 말은, 실제로 일어나고 있다는 증거가 없다는 겁니다. 소문이나 추측만으로는 조치를 취하지 않습니다.

13

예, 이전에 한 번 다뤄본 적이 있습니다.

여기 메타의 위키 게시물에서 같은 문제가 발생한다는 것을 이전에 보고하기도 했었죠.

14

하지만, 존중하는 마음으로 말씀드리면, 당신은 하나의 데이터 포인트일 뿐입니다.

15

우리 팀에서는 적어도 4번의 별개의 사례가 발생했습니다. 심각하냐고요? 아니요. 잡기가 좀 어렵긴 합니다. 수정된 항목이 활동 목록 상단으로 올라오지 않기 때문에 우연히 발견한 거예요. 아직 발견하지 못한 다른 사례도 있을 수 있습니다. TL0을 24시간으로 설정하는 것도 나쁘지 않은 선택지인 것 같습니다. 꽤 오랫동안 이 문제를 겪지 않았으니, 만약 그 당시 기본값이 그렇게 설정되어 있었다면 우리의 문제가 해결되었을지도 모릅니다.