Human Spammers - Weight user internally for later reference

phreak

Hi all,

My community is growing and once or twice a day there are users coming in who SPAM manually (human spammers). Although these users are not stupid and do like they are regulars first, post up to 10 postings to be much more integrated in the community. This makes their following posts more trustworthy than when they have only one post. Also other people already reacted to them, what makes it harder to delete their posts completely.

Still they only start discussion to place a link or any other "pseudo-positive" feedback about a product or else. I run my community very clean of those bastards, what makes a great quality community.

For me it would be great to have a plugin that, allows me and my moderators to mark users with flags we can only give and se internally. Let's say i see a user who is suspicious to me (acts offside the regular user) and i want to remind later about him (not yet delete him, i'm not yet sure). Yep, i could write it down on a paper, but then my moderators wont have this information. It might be better to mark those users with flags. For example with colors (green, yellow, orange, red). If a user comes to attention i could give him a yellow mark (that tells everyone of the Mods and Admins, he is a probable spammer). If i come later to the conclusion i was wrong i again mark him green.

But if he is a spammer and behaves like expected, Moderators could give him a red flag, indicating i (the Admin) has to delete that user. An orange flag could still be some indicator that the spammer is more likely o be one, even though we are not sure yet and we will check later (same with yellow).

Of course this could also be accomplished with another form of rating like A, B, C, D or any other idea.

Spammers get smarter, and their backgrounds are different. Some want to place a link, other want to make bad marketing about a product or a company.

I had the chance in the past to see an office were about 50 to 80 people worked just to interact with comments on news paper sites and in forums to raise opinions. Companies like this have contracts with a lot of major companies who want to be sure to have a task force at hand when they are releasing a product or another company makes bad marketing. They have software tools that listen to what is happening around their keywords and company names on the web.

Those nests are the ones were human spammers come from.

What do you think of this idea?

businessdad

Guess what we are working on?

peregrine

@Phreak
this could be achieved simply by using the voting, kudos, or I liked or thankful people plugins as one of your models to create the plugin, and only displaying it to moderators or admins. An instead ofsaying liked or thankful, just change it to potential spammer level and if you used voting you could use the voting leaderboard to display the top offenders. All you need is an additional method to subtract the votes kudos or ilked or thankfuls.

but it would certainly be easier for non-developers when a plugin designed for exactly the purpose arrives.