Killing spam reviews

There are a slew of "reviews" of spam books on Hot Review list. They have all been flagged as spam and the books proposed to be marked as spam. The proposals have garnered enough votes to be marked "Threshold met".

Please, could these be removed now from the Hot Review list? It looks awful! Seriously, 22 of the 25 reviews are spam.

We've been asking!

http://www.librarything.com/topic/90064#2025098

It would be nice if "hot reviews" could exclude anything that's been flagged as an abuse of the TOS, as well as any work that's been flagged as a spam work.

> 3

Yes, I agree, at least after there are the requisite number of flags to hide it. It also seems a bit odd to me that the review is hidden on the Zeitgeist review page but not on the Home page.

Yes Please!

3 > Yes!

These are most vexing. A friend recommended a Hot Review to me today but I can't see it because of all of the spam.

#3 Yes!

We had all spam hot reviews yesterday, and today its back (though different spam). Obviously they have figured out how to do it, so it just doesn't need to be deleted, it needs to be fixed.

It should prevent those flagged as spam from getting in, and once something is in and then flagged as spam it should remove it.

They're still going to win, as long as they can enter reviews faster than we can flag them. Hot Reviews are dead, unless there are new restrictions added (more than a certain number of members holding the book, at least one non-manual addition of the book, at least one copy entered more than N days ago, whatever.)

I hope staff can identify the users that have flagged those reviews up and close them down as sock puppets.

>10 lorax: I don't see any reason to think they can enter reviews faster than people can flag them. Talk spam became pretty much a non-issue as soon as flagged messages with no other posts in the thread started being automatically deleted.

If all of the fake books are bundled together under the heading "spam" will that eliminate the numerous reviews popping up under the Hot Reviews column?

I don't know if it's always been there and I just missed it or if it's something new, but I have noticed this Organization info on some profiles...ABC is one of aome such 5,000 organizations on LT...

I noticed it because I was looking at some of the spam/sockpuppet/member abuse issues of late and it occurred to me I was seeing it quite a lot. Sooooooooo I wonder if it might help with these issues to not allow "organizations" to post reviews, engage in talk, etc for a reasonable period of time, such as until they are verified legit???? Possibly quarantine their catalouging from entering the mainstream? Is that even feasible?

12>

Well, people are more likely to see a random Talk post than a random review -- I agree that once they make it to "Hot" status they'll be quickly flagged, but I think they're quite likely to make it there.

>13 StormRaven: Stormraven

Now that we have spam flagging for books, it is actually counterproductive to combine spam books into conglomerates. It's better to nominate them for squashing, and flag the dratted spammer too.

16: I've already done both, I was just wondering if there was a stopgap way we could get the multiple reviews off the Hot Reviews list until the LT staff is able to suppress the spam works.

Hot reviews now removes anything that has been flagged twice. It refreshes every 5 minutes.

Firsts now removes anything flagged twice. It's instant.

Sorry the problem got so bad. A thread like this, titled "Killing spam reviews" sounds to me like a general discussion, or something along the lines of the other kill-spam threads, which Sonya/Dan monitor. So I leave it unread until I have time to dig into it. I didn't realize there was this huge problem until I got a profile comment. Anyway, just so you realize how my workflow works--somethings get my almost immediate attention, and some may or may not be looked at on any particular day.

*thumbs up*

Thanks Tim!

Yes, thanks for the fix.

So in the future we should use thread headings like this?

HUGE SPAM PROBLEM IN HOT REVIEWS!!! TIM, PLEASE FIX!!!

I'm only half joking.

I think an urgent problem should probably go to my profile or email either way.

Tim

Thanks Tim. Good to have hot reviews back.

Incidentally, I'm doing a general spam cleanup. In some circumstances a book continues to appear even though the user has been removed for spamming. I'm instituting a nightly process that removes it. For various caching reasons that will take another 24 hours or so to percolate throughout the the site.

I also sunk my teeth into the top-rated books list on the zeitgeist and have so far killed two of them as spam—updated in the next 24 hours. More to follow.

Thank you!

The dead pool is 28,000 books. They're evenly distributed across time.

I also sunk my teeth into the top-rated books list on the zeitgeist and have so far killed two of them as spam—updated in the next 24 hours. More to follow.

Yay! Which ones? I also suspect there's some sockpuppetry rating going on there with a couple of books. (Speaking of which: any chance of upping the number thresholds for top rated authors and books? There's some really obscure stuff in there. I'm sure the Kyoto Costume Institute is really cool, but...)

23 >

If I understand correctly, there's a daily job that is removing books that belonged to spammer accounts which were removed, correct?

If that book was the only copy of a work (often the case with a spammer) will the spammy work be purged as well?

(This is slightly OT, though spam related, so I can move it to another thread if that would be better.)

Is there any chance that CK entered by members removed as spammers could be purged from CK after a while? See for instance the 2 most recent members to edit the CK for this work:
http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/changelog.php?item=8497348&type=...

23 - when you say works are removed, do you mean they're hidden as spam, as in what happens when something gets flagged and voted as spam? Or do you mean something else, more like real deletion?

28> I have to interrupt to say that that link/work has suddenly enlightened me to one method LT uses to come up with recommendations, and I laughed pretty hard.

Also, it has 1 member but 17 reviews - I take it the reviews are all from spam accounts that were deleted? Or the member added 17 copies?

The books are flagged as removed, which removes them as much as a book you delete. They will take a while to die out of cached information, like top books and so forth.

Yes, that was one of the offenders. He went down from more than 100 copies to one. As you'll see if you click the reviews link, the 17 reviews are no longer there. Review counts for works are updated nightly.

I'll look at CK.

Tim, why are you saying 28,000 books in #25 when the spam page says 14,000 (getting on for 15,000)?

v

Sorry. I'm being too abbreviated. There were 28,000 books belonging to deleted members which were not themselves deleted. (In most circumstances it checks the user's status too, but not all, as members have found with the "Members" thing.)

I'm going to move on to automatically mark works as suppressed if they belong only to members who were deleted, and do not have valid, checking ISBNs.

Three cheers for Captain Spalding!

>34 timspalding:: Tim, I think that's a great decision to automatically mark works as suppressed if they belong only to members who were deleted, and do not have valid ISBNs. That would cover the vast majority of the spam works, I'd suspect, that members have had to vote on to suppress as spam.

Of course, the burden is on us all to help identify spammers as soon as we spot them.

Hip Hip Hooray!

And another cheer: you got rid of the "Leadership" book too!

Yeah. That one pissed me off. I left a note for the guy that said if he ever tried it again I'd make sure the LibraryThing page was #1 for his name, and included a detailed demonstration of his spamming.

37/38: Yay!

Okay, that suppressed about 14,000 works.

Tim

Yay!

*Thrusts burning brand into huge pile of suppressed books*

Again, three cheers for Captain Spalding!

(with apologies/recognition to other Marx brothers fans :-)

Suppressed another 1,200.

*Thrusts burning brand into huge pile of suppressed books*

I know—all the fun of a good-old-fashioned book burning, but instead we're protecting the book world! Woohoo! :)

Woot!!

>26 rsterling: By the way, the Kyoto Costume Institute is really cool; I can totally see that most of the people who own those books would rate them highly.