I have seen a dozen of blatant spam on dev.to since today morning from atleast 3 different accounts, which I have subsequently reported.
Please refrain from harming this great community. As for others who have witnessed similar things on your feed, please report them as well.
It will also be great if dev.to imposes a stricter spam avoidance mechanism on posting to feed, since shitoberfest is already a real thing now. 😔
PS. I have screen recorded my feed if needed later on, but would prefer not to doxx anyone or violate anyone's privacy.
Thanks to Karl Heinz Marbaise, https://dev.to/search?q=customer%20care%20number&filters=class_name:Article filters out these reports for ease of removal.
Top comments (48)
Hello everyone! On behalf of the DEV team, thank you for your help in surfacing and reporting these accounts.
Our team is both proactively seeking these accounts out and responding to complaints around the clock. We are also talking through a more permanent fix but in the meantime, we are banishing users and their posts/comments from the site as we find them.
Thanks again for your help in making DEV a positive, helpful, and spam-free environment for all!
@graciegregory Here is a suggestion of spam rules.
Spam Filter Rules Examples:
source: dev.to/crimsonmed/updating-dev-spa...
I know dev team is working hard on this but this is really getting out of hand now:
dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/...
That's great to hear.
Also seeing the spam, though assuming your feed looks the same as mine, I'm not sure how you could possibly doxx anyone appropriately. It's not like the spammer is posting their own details (I mean, I could be wrong, but it's not the usual MO).
More likely, by repeating the info they're spamming, you'd be helping the spammer.
Re tighter posting controls - count me in. There's a number of ways to do it, and we're a community of developers / designers / architects. Probably the best I've seen was LifeHacker US before the site was sold to Gawker Media. Initially your account was "untrusted" and your posts hidden unless others wanted to look at hidden posts. Over time, as people replied to your comments or "gave love" or "upvoted" your posts etc, you gained "reputation." Eventually you have enough rep that your posts are visible by default. No-one could see their own rep, and rep could be negatively impacted too (confirmed spam reports etc).
I would leave the internal logic to the people at dev.to and the OSS contributors they have. Irrespective of that, you're idea seems a bit stringent since a lot of beginners post to dev.to. If I were to suggest, a round of recaptcha is perfectly reasonable at the least.
The logic is of course, up to the platform maintainers to determine, I was just throwing out an example for preventing comment spam that I'd seen work well (LifeHacker US posts, back then, could only be published by LifeHacker employees). There was a simple button for anyone who cared to view new user comments.
But yes, that system wouldn't work well for new users trying to post content, rather than comments.
Re doxx'ing - again, the contact numbers you're seeing are the ones the spammer wants you to see. Chasing those is like chasing faked emails, where the email has been sent from a server that allows open relaying. Regardless, my personal opinion is that doxx'ing should never be done. There's better ways to handle the situation, whatever the situation is (not just limited to spamming).
Thanks. I wasn't aware of that. I hope the devs look at your suggestions as well.
As for the doxxing, I assume that the spam posts are being flooded on everyone's feed since the posts don't have any tags. And I'd safely assume they are fake accounts. Yet I am unsure if that will be the right thing to do. Also, a lot of these posts have contact numbers. To start off, the enforcers can look at them.
This type of logic prevented me from posting in many reddit groups, to the point that I gave up on them. In my opinion, it provides a better user experience for older accounts at the cost of a not-too-nice user experience for new people.
I have reported 10 accounts today.
I am not sure how current spam filter works but the spam script is posting same post over and over again.
I think the devs can create a logic which restricts users from posting same content under an hour.
Yes. This should have been a basic feature. Also I cannot find anything relevant on their github where I may raise an issue for their collaborators.
In a very hilarious situation ,the spam bots have now invaded their github issues.
github.com/forem/forem/issues
Someone is trolling @ben :D .
I have reported a few to dev's twitter handle on Thursday and it was taken down. But it looks like this is an ongoing problem.
I have reported in the meantime about 20 via reporting feature ... having issues to report a number of them based on a limit (to prevent flooding ;-)) ... I got message by filling out the spam form:
Things like that...
Searching for "customer care" already identifies a lot of them....
So searching via
will identify a lot of them... it seemed to be working very well and very easy....
So the following works even better:
That's a great job on your part. I will append it to the main article as it may help in properly reporting this spam issues. Thanks for digging into it.
Exactly. This is what I am facing too
And the number seems to grow. I am seeing new names everytime, I refresh my feed.
Yeah. Sad that all the spam users I have seen so far are from India. This is adversely affecting the reputation of our dev community 😔
I'm reporting a few spam I get in my feed. Looks like that's all we can do for now
It's so exhausting to click through that "I'm not a robot" images that I gave up. I can't even report under 20 minutes I got like 10 steps. Just horrible captcha lately
I am also seeing the spam since morning, I have reported 2 of them, but there are plenty of them.
Exactly. And the thing is that I had to clear more rounds of recaptcha on reporting them than they took to post.
Furthermore, the Indian seeming names pose a negative potrayal for the majority of us. I hope dev looks into it ASAP.
The recaptcha thing to report spam is horrible. I have failed enough times that it deters me from reporting legitimate spam.
True :(
I had reported 4 times during the past week. I feel these are bots, so it will be an uphill battle if some changes aren't made, at least temporarily.
Something like all posts from a new account up to a certain period has to go through manual approval. This will put a huge burden on moderators, so may be we users can help in deciding whether a new post is spam or not by some voting mechanism? These posts will not be visible until approved.
That's a great suggestion. I wish this were directly visible to the devs at dev.to.
Same thing here:
dev.to/crimsonmed/updating-dev-spa...
I have to pick between block or report, can DEV do both with single action?
Even blocking does not stop them from appearing on feed. It just stops dm s.
I think dev.to need to add a spam filter. The "customer care" accounts were created today/yesterday. So, they could add a cool down/recaptcha filter for newer accounts.
That's a great suggestion. Karl has also provided a suitable url to target these posts.