Spam

[DutchPete 247]

How come the forum allows spam posts regularly. Can this not be prevented? Anyone who wants to post on a forum has to be a member of EN, so is it not possible to track down the culprit(s)?

[C6REW 416]

Hi,

 

I have discussed this with other evangelists and evernote staff and I believe it is more complicated than that. But not being a programmer or software techie I cannot give you any details.

 

We are doing our best to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

 

Regards

 

Chris

[Wern 246]

Yes, EN is aware of this problem and does what it can to minimize it.

This forum is monitored 24 hours by mods and as Chris has explained already, we do clean up "by hand" those spams that the automatic forum software filters are missing. Just with "normal" spam on your private e-mail though, no system exists that can take care of this problem automatically and reliably.

 

This EN forum is big now and therefore "worthwhile" for spammers. If they can get a few clicks out of it, they are happy campers.

 

Please be assured that EN is aware of this and the issue is constantly monitored and discussed.

[DutchPete 247]

Chris & Wern, I know EN staff are doing all they can to keep the forum clean & that is very obvious, I am not criticising them, on the contrary, I think they do a good job of manually correcting. But what I don't understand is how it is possible for spammers to hit the forums. The comparison with spam through email is not correct. Your email address is open to receive emails from any source, in principle. That is not the case with the EN forums. The forums only accept posts by members. In other words the spam can only come from 1 or more recognisable sources who could then be barred as members. Perhaps I am seeing it too simplistically but I am puzzled as to how spam could be thrown in from non-member sources.

[DutchPete 247]

The Evernote Life site on Google+ has the same problem. But there I can understand it because anybody can join Google+ & post whatever they want as there does not seem to be any overall authority keeping it in check. On the EN forums EN is in full control & knows its members.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

The Evernote Life site on Google+ has the same problem. But there I can understand it because anybody can join Google+ & post whatever they want as there does not seem to be any overall authority keeping it in check. On the EN forums EN is in full control & knows its members.

It's really very simple. Someone signs up for an account & then posts spam. There is no way to determine if that new account is legitimate or spam until the spam posts are made or the user puts ads in their profile.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

You can create an Evernote account with nothing more than an email. You can create a user account here with nothing more than your Evernote login. In other words, it is just a two-step process instead of a single step. When people are getting paid to do this, they don't mind the extra few seconds. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire process takes less than a minute with a nice Internet connection.

There are other threads on the forums with more details and some discussion about possible solutions.

[DutchPete 247]

But my point is: they can then see immediately from which account the spam is coming & thus close the account.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

But my point is: they can then see immediately from which account the spam is coming & thus close the account.

Which must be done manually...which is exactly what we are doing now.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

But my point is: they can then see immediately from which account the spam is coming & thus close the account.

But the trick is knowing whether a post contains spam. As has been pointed out, if an account is created, there is no way to know whether it is legitimate or not. Then, if that account makes a post, unless the contents are analyzed, there is no way to know whether the contents of a post is spam or not. As far as I know (And I don't know much), the forum software does not scan the contents of posts, and even if it did, it would have a hell of a time detecting one post as spam, and another as legitimate without produce false positives.

 

False positives would be INFURIATING for users. Could you imagine if you are a new forum member, and your first post is falsely detected as spam and not posted, or your account is banned? That, in my opinion, would be far, far worse than a dozen spam posts at 4am. 

 

That being said, us moderators are routinely frustrated with the amount of spam we have to deal with because it is a pretty humdrum job to flag users as spam, and takes away from the time we can spend actually interacting with users. We are vocal about our concerns with Evernote staff, so they are definitely aware!

 

There is definitely room to improve, and we moderators would LOVE to see improvements, I know all users here would love to see improvements.

 

Another discussion:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/59473-why-so-much-spam-on-the-forum/

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Additionally, new acounts are restricted to five posts in the first 24 hours. This is to prevent a spammer from flooding the board with one account. At the same time, there have been at least a few instances where a user who has never used the board before, has a problem & is trying to get help say on a weekend or b/c they are a free user & have not yet received a reply to their support ticket & they get peeved b/c they can no longer post b/c they have hit their five post limit. It not like EN is unconcerned about the problem. As has been mentioned, there have been some intense discussions by mods & EN staff on how to keep spam at a minimum while still allowing new users the ability to get help.

[DutchPete 247]

I understand the software cannot identify spam upfront, which is why I say accounts should be closed after the posting has taken place. From BNF's mail I read that those accounts are indeed closed as soon as possible after the spam post & that is fine. I understand the procedure now so I will leave it at that.

Thank you all for giving me yet another piece of Evernote education. Makes me love Evernote Evermore (sorry, could not resist that little joke).

[Wern 246]

You are welcome !

[DutchPete 247]

I am still not convinced the best course of action is being followed. Spam is getting worse: every day there are more spam messages than the day before. Why is that Jason Frasca who is moderating an unoffical Evernote site on Google+ (https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/103611462316014210610) is able to keep out spam???

He has been trying to alert EN to the fact that their offcial EN site on Google+ is receiving spam with no action being taken by EN.

Other sites are also able to keep it out, so why not EN? Something is not right & EN does not seem to take appropriate action.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Hi Pete,

I understand your frustration. As has been recognized, us moderators are similarly frustrated. 

I imagine one reason for what you are observing is that some website are more attractive to spammers than others. These Evernote forums are fairly large and land pretty high in search results. While I am sure Frasca's communities are also popular, I am not convinced they are as large this one, or as large as Evernote's official Google+ page (I'm not on G+ so I can't speak to whether or not action is or isn't being taken on the EN G+ page, so I can't comment there). I think scale is a huge factor here. 

 

The fact is, other sites can't keep spam out. Other sites still suffer. The Apple Support Communities also see a fair bit of spam similar in nature to what we see here. If you hang around there and go to those communities, say, first thing in the morning in an American time zone, you'll see plenty of spam too. Big communities are big targets and get blasted harder by spam than small communities. Some invariably gets through. I don't have statistics on this, but when I've got little glimpses of stats, it is a fraction of one percent of spam that actually appears on these boards.

 

I can't speak to whether EN is doing everything they could possible do in this respect, because I am not an employee and don't know all of the mechanisms in place or not in place. That being said, I know that Evernote cares about these communities and their quality, and I KNOW they are aware that spam is an ongoing issue (PM spam is a growing issue these days... and we have been plenty vocal about it to staff). I am confident that they will take whatever steps they can to reduce spam, but there may be little else they can do without overhauling their entire community system (which is tied into their support system and whatnot, so this would be difficult to do), or what they can do might take time or significant resources and may not show up tomorrow. 

 

I would like to see less spam too and every bit of spam is frustrating. We know spam is an ongoing issue, and us moderators can only ever be reactive. A lot of proactive anti-spam stuff is in place already by Evernote staff, and any further changes to proactive anti-spam may not be as simple as adding a new plugin to the forum software or cranking up a threshold. 

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

Ah, just stopped into the Apple Support Communities this morning and guess what I saw:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s25/sh/aa0df6ac-e9a7-4f85-bb20-710f4cf0d32b/b285d0d8ba653763276304a4c65b3327

[DutchPete 247]

OK Scott, I guess we'll have to live with it, there's no other way. Thanks for your responses in any case.

[megsaint 441]

Ah, just stopped into the Apple Support Communities this morning and guess what I saw:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s25/sh/aa0df6ac-e9a7-4f85-bb20-710f4cf0d32b/b285d0d8ba653763276304a4c65b3327

 

It's a HUGE problem over on the Apple Support Communities. Some of the senior members have made suggestions such as limiting the number of posts initially or giving us limited moderation abilities. We've been told they're continuing to work on solutions. It's gotten a tiny bit better but remains a problem. I'm very grateful for the five post limit here. 

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Also very grateful that the board software auto deletes all posts, when the user is flagged as a spammer. This has saved us mods countless hours!!!

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Also, the more popular the product/board is, the more attractive it is to spammers. As Evernote has grown, we've seen the amount of spam grow, too. After all, why spam a message board that has only five visitors a day? If you can choose between spamming a board with a million visitors a day or one with 10 million visitors a day, which one you gonna pick?

[Stuhrer 253]

I think spam is getting worse. Because I am in Europe and a few hours ahead, it doesn't make sense for me to use the forum in the morning because it is full of spam. I have never seen a similar problem in other popular forums. There should be a way to prevent this!

[jefito 5,589]

It has been getting worse, plus some of the tools previously available to moderators aren't there now, in particular the one that lets you mark a user as a spammer, which would take care of all of their posts, rather than needing to mark the posts individually. That takes more time. Also, it's not clear whether the new moderator crew have really kicked in yet. So post up; 300 posts, and spam cleaning duty could be yours!!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,320]

Yeah. On a mobile device with poor internet connection I try to save every screen refresh for other stuff besides cleaning up spam one post at a time. It's just too much to handl that way. I'm on Asia time, so I usually see two, three, or more pages of spam before I get to any posts. You'd think the filters would be able to catch so much obvious spam. I mean, a lot of it isn't even in English, which is the language used in the forum.

[ScottLougheed 1,316]

indeed the spam has been pretty brutal. You don't even need to be in a non-western time zone. When I'm up at about 6am Eastern time, I've been seeing multiple pages of spam.