- Home /
Are you considering to leave UnityAnswers if the spammers arent stopped?
Hi there, I've been trying to fight that annoying spammer we seem to have every sunday in this forum.
I've even tried to contact support about it, but nothing is really done.
The spammer creates a new account. Then goes into several questions and posts a spam message as an answer.
Result: everyone participating in the question/answer thread gets a copy of this "oooh so important" answer.
Are you considering this to be annoying enough to leave UnityAnswers until its fixed?
What is more likely to make me quit is some of the absolutely braindead questions that some people ask here "how do i make $$anonymous$$$$anonymous$$O, duuurrrr"
$$anonymous$$acer, I agree. Why are all these no-hopers co$$anonymous$$g here? They will never get anywhere with their attitudes, so they are a waste of time to help. They outnumber by 100 to 1 the studious newbie who within a few questions becomes a contributing member of the community.
Exactly. We're here to help (God knows I need it) but people also need to try to learn themselves or we all end up writing complete scripts for people! I struggled with Unity for ages before I realised it was too tough, so I put myself through a game dev course in C++... Unity is a cinch after that! LOL.
@BerggreenD$$anonymous$$ re "Perhaps we should just post them links to tutorials on other sites and that way help them get going. I agree these questions are rather lame, but we have all been there a long time ago I think." I agree. But sometimes when I post links to the manuals or such, I get flamed for not being more helpful. I don't see any point in copy/pasting things from other places esp. when a simple Googling will get them straight there. $$anonymous$$ore ideas: Include a section of Google results on questions BEFORE allowing to post a question. Put a button like "Still don't see anything related to your question here? Ok then, hit Post and we'll ask it here".
Answer by Graham-Dunnett · Sep 09, 2011 at 10:54 AM
We know that spam has become a problem. Today we made a small change:
a) Only users with karma of 15 or above can post questions and answers directly to the site. b) Users with Karma below 15 have their posts submitted into a moderation queue. c) Any user with Karma of 1000 or more can view the moderation queue and approve posts for publishing to the site.
This obviously means the community has to be involved in fighting spam, and making sure that new real users have their contributions approved. There's nothing stopping a spammer posting one real question or answer and having it voted up, then they can get on with spamming.
We're in touch with BerggreenDK (the OP) and he's given lots of ideas and suggestions for more robust solutions.
$$anonymous$$e neither! (( I can't approve questions, I mean )) I tried to log out and in again, but it didn't work. Please place an easy link to the moderation queue in the questions page, preferably showing how many pending questions/answers are in the queue.
I somewhat agree with @Warwick Allison, but I think it's better to improve the new measure ins$$anonymous$$d: I suggest that only answers be submitted into the moderation queue.
A warning: if some real user is behind this spam flood, he can upvote his fake creature and free the spam - you must keep record of each vote to find the culprit.
Oh dear, oh dear... I agree that this seems all too rushed... However, we can't just go ahead and put all the blame on the site.
(Though your communication-policy was bottom of the barrel and someone showing up in this thread could have prevented a lot of pain...)
After silently putting up with the issue, eating in our frustration, it was us who now pressed qato into rushing, me thinks... =/ Threatening to leave if it's not resolved ASAP and so on...
I have to admit I don't dislike this feature, by contrast... =/
Call me power-hungry and order-obsessed, but I would see it as an opportunity to deal with the other really nerve-$$anonymous$$ring issue around: highly sub-standard quality of asking (be it punctuation, information, proper title, formatting, a-quick-google-would-fix-it... ) [note: I'm not talking about bad English but blatantly obvious laziness!]
I've noticed that many new users, when told to fix stuff about said issues, give you a friendly nod and ignore you. Especially if they already received an answer.
But when the question is there and you know the answer it's just too tempting to give it. And if you think to yourself 'no, I won't answer until he shows some effort' someone else jumps in...
But this $$anonymous$$ches people that ignorance is allowed and leaves many extraordinarily ugly questions. Sometimes with even very good answers. But for god's sake, you can't bring yourself to vote up a question that's sooo bad, so the pretty answers get buried.
Ultimately this is really bad for UA, me thinks.
This feature could be a tool to discipline ourselves into healthy helping. You get friendly and eager help - if you show some effort first!
This new feature would be a possibility to only let posts in that show a $$anonymous$$imum compliance with the rules.
However, I'm well aware that this does not lack its dangers and could easily turn into massive censorship... =/ I'm certainly a candidate that would need some call to order once in a while when I show too much scrunity... -.-'
So we would need very strict and detailed guidelines to prevent abuse!!
Greetz, $$anonymous$$y.
Graham, I started to suspect this was just an existing moderation feature. I understand you mean well, but moderated communities are completely different communities, if they are communities at all. Almost no sites use moderation (ironically mainly old-media sites and bigot groups).
The real human users here are good people and do not need gagging like this just because of the repeated attacks of a single robot spammer.
Unfortunately, your communication makes it even clearer that the problem is not even understood by the owners of this site, which was the original concern. Unity need to start taking this site seriously and valuing it. Ignoring this simple spam problem for months is just one indicator of the problem. They are also ruining it by driving too many ultra-novices here with ever more free-edition users yet no proportional support. (I have nothing against the free edition, but I have a problem with Unity not supporting its users).
@BerggreenD$$anonymous$$: spam detection is not a topic for this site ;-). But seriously, it's hardly a new topic. All the more amateurish that it has persisted here, don't you think? Pick any one of these spams and google the text - you will see thousands of other sites targeted by the same spammer. This means that even a simple rejection mechanism will probably stop him even bothering - we don't need to get all "oh, but then he could automatically up vote himself and blah blah blah - he's simply not going to bother. The incompetence of other site ad$$anonymous$$istrators is the best defence against spammers, because it means you don't have to set the bar very high.
Ins$$anonymous$$d, this site doesn't even use Captcha, allows completely blind OpenID sign-up, and allows users to signup and post all in a single action with not so much as an email confirmation.
I do want to start off by saying thank you for at least trying to come up with a solution. There are some communities where the support is so bad that they would just ignore the communities' complaints about spam. I don't think its a great solution, but its good to know you guys are working on it.
I am interested though. A while back (maybe a month or two ago) you guys gave some pro$$anonymous$$ent members including myself moderator status. That was useful because I was able to suspend the spammers account within $$anonymous$$utes of him spam$$anonymous$$g a question or two. Reporting is a handy feature for dealing with disgruntled or aggressive users, but it isn't very effective at stopping spam. He posts about 16 times then never uses that account again.
So I wonder why you took moderator status away after 2 days and made a few of the moderator powers 10k karma privilages. Could we maybe get a few more moderators? I mean you can't be on the site all day catching everything that comes up Graham. Thats just not fair to you. I don't know exactly how many we'd need or how we would pick mods, but a few trustworthy people more people who can immediately block someone's posting rights would be beneficial in my oppinion.
Answer by Bovine · Aug 18, 2011 at 08:37 PM
No. Unity Answers and the kind help from this community is invaluable. I can cope with the odd id#ot spamming me once a week - I would lose hours, days and possibly weeks without the help I receive here.
I don't want the spam, but do you really want to give up this wonderful resource?
I feel the same way. Sure, spam sucks, but it's not that bad, and UnityAnswers is far too good a resource to sacrifice for a few stupid posts.
@BerggreenD$$anonymous$$ - that's your choice. I know it's frustrating, but you could probably setup an email filter for potential unity spammers as they tend to follow a very predictable format.
I don't auto-subscribe to any threads, just ones I really want to follow, so I almost never get email spam. I do get my questions spammed, and that's annoying. But I've posted ideas how to mediate such things, deaf ears.
Well. If it wasn't for these forums I would have been lost. In 6 months of being here I've had to ask 1 question. You guys are awesome answering even the most noob question which allowed me to just look them up and get to work learning unity. Now I'm happy to help the newer posters since this forum is more helpful than I can say. Thanks for all of you who put up with the spam to help out people like me.
I really mean that. Thank you.
And these forums wouldnt work if those giving out their knowledge leaves, right? so Unity people needs to start paying attention to "us" giving our help away.
Answer by jimmyismike · Aug 29, 2011 at 09:09 PM
I might leave. The spammer is really getting annoying. I thumb down their answer each time.
@BerggreenD$$anonymous$$: the answer which matches your opinion is considered "correct". LOL :)
@Bovine - I agree with his answer. I might leave soon if nothing is done and I will still keep thumbing down until that. Everyone should thumbdown on spammers to get their account blocked. Once you get below certain $$anonymous$$us karma, your options to post are removed. Secondly under the answer you can "report" (dunno if this only is available to karma over a certain level too). But if you can report, then you can mark it as "spam". So - I might leave and I will keep fighting until then.
@POLYGA$$anonymous$$e according to FAQ you need 100 $$anonymous$$arma to downvote (and each downvote costs you 2 $$anonymous$$arma).
The more general decline in this site makes me less interested in participating. Too many lazy questioners. Too much spam. I won't leave, but maybe I'll just get grumpier and nastier until someone has to kick me off. Well, probably not, but that is the sociological reason why QATO and Unity need to do something about the problems (QATO by implementing technical mechanisms and Unity by setting policies). Communities that have constant input of external negative social behaviour surely tend to breed further anti-social behaviour, especially if they have no way to defend themselves.
I completely agree Warick. I've found myself co$$anonymous$$g by less frequently in the last month or two. There just aren't many questions that are new and worth the time to answer. $$anonymous$$ost questions are one of the following:
Dupes of a question that I've answered many times before. Fortunately, many of these are quick answers so I sometimes will pick these up.
Very specific individual uses. I know the FAQ says to be specific in what someone is asking for, but I have found a lot of questions where the person has been so specific that they will only benefit a very small number of people. Where the question takes time to answer b/c its a collection of a lot of small questions that the user didn't take the time to break the question into parts.
People asking where a button is. I don't have anything against beginners, but that's exactly the kind of thing the manual is for- getting the user up to speed with navigating the program.
Answer by KrisCadle · Sep 06, 2011 at 05:55 PM
Leave and go where?
This forum is amazingly awesome and I've never seen so many people sharing so much of their work and time with other people. And, they seem to really hope that newbies learn and get good and contribute themselves. My god man, this place is WONDERFUL!
Leave because someone is trying to spam the forum? That's just silly. They will fix it.
Toss the baby right out with the bath, huh... indeed...
Have you helped others yet or placed a question? once you start doing that, and the thread gets spammed, you will start to receive them too. Is that okay with you?
I agree the place is amazing and an incredible wealth of knowledge. But the spam $$anonymous$$UST be stopped... it's getting worse and worse and seems to be co$$anonymous$$g from the same person. Let's not let one person ruin it for us!
yup, spammers should get a visit to the tooth fairy... leaving doesn't solve the problem, but I think Unity will if you give them a chance...
Answer by Dan the Man · Sep 05, 2011 at 11:07 PM
I already did. gamedev.stackexchange.com, you rock!
I'm there too. Samle handle. http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/users/3115/berggreendk
====( http://www.clothes6.us )=====
online store wholesale sneakers,Jerseys, jewelry, glasses, shirt, sports,handbags,clothes ,news, vogue,jeryse at ugg boots,luxury fashion ysl women boots, christian louboutin boots,ed hardy clothes, jordan shoes,nike shoes,hoodies,t-shirts,nfl jerseys,mlb jerseys,nhl jerseys,coach handbags,handbags,wholesale, retail, sunglasses,belts, caps, ed hardy caps,suit,fashion good,newest style goods All the products are free shipping,
====( http://www.clothes6.us )=====
free shipping
competitive price
any size available
accept the paypal
jordan shoes $32
nike shox $32
$$anonymous$$BT shoes 48
NFL jersys 24
NBA jersys 24
Timberland boots 45
Christan Audigier bikini $20
Ed Hardy Bikini $23
Smful short_t-shirt_woman $14
ed hardy short_tank_woman $15
Sandal $26
christian louboutin $60
Sunglass $14
COACH_Necklace $18
handbag $33
AF tank woman $16
====( http://www.clothes6.us )=====
Strange thing: this is the first spam comment I ever saw in UA, and added just to this question...
Your answer
![](https://koobas.hobune.stream/wayback/20220612183804im_/https://answers.unity.com/themes/thub/images/avi.jpg)
Follow this Question
Related Questions
How do I ask a good Question? 5 Answers
Unity Forum UnityAnswers OpendID Login 2 Answers
[META] Karma: Why & What? 5 Answers
Editing tags, questions, and the Bounty System [New Ua] 1 Answer
Why dose UA have 2 diffrent layouts? 1 Answer