Home Forums Website Help & Suggestions Who Likes SPAM?

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  • #114

    I know we all like delicious SPAM, but since a lot of us don’t like the electronic flavor, the website has an automoderator lurking in the shadows, trying its best to protect us from the unsavoriness of the wild web.

    Unfortunately, I’d call it (and most other AI-type robots that do this sort of thing) an H1/P1 or maybe H2/P2 on a good day. It knows to not launch into a thunderstorm, but it does often land with the wind and blows its launches a lot.

    Sometimes the automoderator gets false positives on new topics or replies. From your point of view, it will look like your post just disappeared. WTF? Luckily, this doesn’t happen very often, and I can count on one hand the number of folks that it’s “punished” (through no fault of their own), but I thought I might throw up a short list of things that it tends to trigger its spidey senses:

    • Really long topics/replies
    • Topics/replies with a lot of links or images
    • Words/phrases/grammatical patterns that it thinks are “spammy”
    • Several edits to the same topic/reply in a short period of time (this one gets triggered the most)

    Long-term, the plan is to remove the automod completely, but that’s a process (have to make sure we’re keeping all of the bots out while not having to have a human babysit new signups). In the meantime, if you think you’ve been automodded, fire off an email to info@shga.com and we’ll un-spam your post as soon as we see it.

    #615

    It will soon be a battle of AI against AI.   🙁

    We’ve had an ongoing battle with SPAM on U.S. Hawks. We have three levels of defense:

    1. We ask one of a few registration questions generally known by hang gliding pilots (along with my phone number for newbies who might not know the answers).

    2. All newly registered members can only post in the new members forum (which is set for no searching).

    3. Approving of real members requires an actual phone call (in addition to answering the automated question).

    But at some point, an AI spoambot will be able to pass all of those tests … including the phone call.   🙁

    “Tell me again Grampa. Tell me again what it was like when people were smarter than computers.”

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