Promoters and spam

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  HueyData on 02/08/2008 - 17:24

  Alternatively, for people like me, maybe I could have an option to ignore certain posters for whom I’ve decided that their deals are never of any use to me.

  Good suggestion. A blacklist for sites and/or posters would be useful.

  • 

    scotty on 02/08/2008 - 19:41

    We have already black listed sites that are clearly spamming. Do you mean user-level black listing so you will never see posts from a certain site or user?

    It should be relatively easy to implement but will be more "taxing" on the database server so I hope not everyone is using it :) If you want this feature to be implemented, queue it in the Features and Bugs forum.

    • 

      HueyData on 02/08/2008 - 21:01

      Do you mean user-level black listing so you will never see posts from a certain site or user?

      Yep. Feature request on the way.

      Thanks, scotty.

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  kcyw on 02/08/2008 - 17:31

  I think the front page works quite well at filtering out self-promotions and spams with the votes threshold. You can always increase the number if you feel like there are too many deals. I also ignore anything with mwave though. But it's pretty easy to skip over them since they are usually well labeled.

  • 

    adam on 02/08/2008 - 17:36

    They're not so easy to ignore when they all get SMS'd to you. And as I've said, that feature is quite useful for real bargains.

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  scotty on 02/08/2008 - 19:38

  @adam — if volume is your concern, we can change how we tweet about the new deals. For example only after they reached a certain threshold (or only when they appear on the front page). It would eliminate spams because they usually get negative votes and get unpublished.

  Obviously it removes the advantage of getting instant notification on new deals posted. But you don't really want something like that unless you are a moderator anyway.

  Twitter itself is a PITA because of its inflexibility. Unlike a real IM bot, you can't do something like only publishing the deals with x number of votes, for these followers only… One option is — only tweet about the deals getting more than 3 votes (at the point when the 3rd vote is casted), however providing instant notification via other means like Jabber/XMPP. The only reason I added the Twitter functionality is to get instant notification via XMPP but since Twitter's IM functionality is indefinitely broken at the moment it is defeating the purpose. I might as well write my own XMPP bot to do that.

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    adam on 03/08/2008 - 09:49

    Thinking more about both the twitter interface and the RSS interface I realise that my original request is stupid - i.e. of course you couldn't customise either for particular users, unless there was custom RSS feeds for individual users and twitters were sent as direct messages rather than as general tweets, both of which require a tonne of work.

    I for one would prefer the tweets and RSS feeds to stay as they are for now rather than trigger them after x votes - the usefulness of these (the tweets in particular) are that you see the new deals quickly, and having to wait for 3 votes would change that.

    I'm actually not so concerned about the blatant spam such as the batteries this week as much as I am about what I perceive as regular semi-spam from the businesses with accounts here. There are many business whose entire store is filled with bargains, or who offer new bargains every day - that should qualify as one post - not numerous posts about their store behind the guise of 'todays bargain'.

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  [Deactivated] on 05/08/2008 - 10:13

  One simple way to limit all this is to limit these stores to a number of posts per week. These are not "last minute" ideas they are planned, so if each one of these stores are given 2 per week then they can combine deals into one posting. They can also post a link to their own daily newsletters, so that those who like their general offers can get these directly. I get TopBuy, COTD and a few others.

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  T Man on 05/11/2008 - 17:39

  http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/7614
  My comment - "User has never voted, never posted before, only been a member 1 week. The item isn’t that cheap, and requires as much shipping than the item costs ($5 USD so $10 bucks for an ipod case, there is way cheaper out there). So i would say, not a bargain, probably spam. Maybe we should instigate some kind of no deal submitting until you have been a member for 1 month, and have voted / commented on X amount of deals? There have been a few random sites submitting deals lately, i.e. the triwing screwdriver etc."

  What do you think about that idea? its not perfect, as possibly some people only become members when they see a really good deal, but im not sure on the stats of how many people post a deal in their first month as members,

  • 

    scotty on 05/11/2008 - 21:23

    We have more discussions here in another thread: Deal posting from Overseas.

    The "deal" that you have referenced, which I am going to ban the whole domain soon, is actually posted by someone who claimed to be from the Gold Coast, from in fact is having a Hong Kong IP address.

    That's deceiving — pretending that you are an Aussie to try to avoid moderation. Again, putting all overseas poster into a moderation queue first will eliminate a lot of spams. I will be working on that hopefully this week.

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  twig on 30/11/2008 - 22:11

  just a suggestion that came to mind, is there currently a limit to the number of submissions a user can make per time interval (hour/day/week/etc) ?

  • 

    scotty on 01/12/2008 - 11:03

    There isn't one at the moment. This might be variable to a user's "rating", once we figure out how to calculate that…

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      [Deactivated] on 02/12/2008 - 08:03

      Scotty - that makes a lot of sense - so put the thinking cap on - :-)