I joined the website today to answer a question.

There is A LOT of spam on this website. I have not been programming websites in the last six years, but even I implemented basic ideas to frustrate the robots.

Who moderates the spam and can we get rid of those postings? Also, can someone please implement a more difficult way to join the website?

asked Jun 25 '14 at 21:23

Mark%20Tabladillo's gravatar image

Mark Tabladillo
61123

1

Does anyone else think it ironic that a forum about machine learning doesn't have a decent spam filter? This is my first visit to the site and seeing the front page covered in spam does not fill me with confidence about the site's quality. I suspect many people will take one look and go elsewhere.

(Nov 28 '14 at 08:53) Dave Kirby

3 Answers:

As far as I can tell, spam is only moderated by regular users through flagging. I agree that most of it would be trivial to filter out automatically. Given the spam problem and the fact that, on a good day, metaoptimize takes 5+ seconds to load, I rarely visit any more and have moved on to alternatives over at Stack Exchange e.g. http://datascience.stackexchange.com/ and http://stats.stackexchange.com/.

answered Jun 26 '14 at 13:44

yeastwars's gravatar image

yeastwars
23171417

I think it would be enough if the maintainers added a captcha for posting a question/comment. It is easy to implement and very effective.

answered Jun 29 '14 at 07:49

Joan%20Puigcerver's gravatar image

Joan Puigcerver
3114

Thank you everyone. I have added a captcha quiz to new user account creation. This should make it more difficult for spammers to join the site.

I will be monitoring the effectiveness, and will make the controls stricter if need be.

You can email me at: turian at gmail dot com

answered Sep 07 '14 at 23:57

Joseph%20Turian's gravatar image

Joseph Turian ♦♦
579051125146

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