A little off-topic but handy advice.

A little off-topic but handy advice.

When you see a spam post, do not comment on it. Follow the three magic steps: Report, Block, Mute.

Report the post (and/or the user - I normally just report the user, but follow your own conscience)
Block the user, so they can't use you as a vector
Mute the user, so you never have to see them again.

Comments

  1. Rob Wilson Oh yes, follow all three steps!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Julian Davies I suddenly feel nervous! :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Been doing that a lot recently. There have been some VERY disturbing ones.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've recently been checking the user's post history, and where they have posted the same thing to many communities (the classical definition of spam) I've reported each such post individually, regardless of the post's apparent "appropriateness" to any of those communities. In theory this gives G+'s AI more data points to correlate.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I've been considering leaving G+ entirely because of the spam. Reporting and blocking gets very repetitive and annoying really quickly.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I would think that commenting on the spam post to tell the spammer that they've been reported just adds to the interaction points for the spammer, making the content less likely to get automatically flagged as spam.

    I've been reporting obvious spammers through the feedback system with screenshots. The spammers sometimes stick around for weeks, which is ridiculous. The same one or two posts with no variation sent to dozens of communities and several removed posts should be easy to identify as spam.

    Blocking also has the effect of muting, so you don't specifically need to mute the spammer.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Guys, remember to report and block any spammers that follow you.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Part of the problem is that you can't (yet) mute people or bots - which is far more likely - from their comments. Some of the spam (especially Arabic for some bizarre reason) begins in the comments.

    And no.. I'm not being racist or whatever. I'd be perfectly happy if they had something to do with the raspberry pi at all, or at least was relevant to the post they're commenting on.

    Plug some of that shit into google translate, and you'll notice that it is as I call it... spam.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Thanks, Rob Masters - we'd encourage people to follow that advice. Google+ can be a frustrating place these days. We're really sorry about the spam; sometimes the people in our team who try to keep on top of this are off-site or are tied up with other things, and if that coincides with a flurry of spam, it's pretty annoying; that's what happened over the last couple of days.

    I've turned on 'hold posts for approval' for new members of this community, an option that you can't see until you play around with settings (it looks like a binary 'hold all posts'/'don't hold posts' switch until you try turning it on). Yes, I do feel quite silly for not playing around with this before. I hope it helps.

    ReplyDelete

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