Posts held for Moderation Should positively Indicate status

accalia

Posts flagged as spam by Akismet are not positively indicated as such, leading to end user confusion.

These posts should have positive indication that they are being held for moderation or are flagged as spam in order to remove end user confusion.

I would suggest placing text in the hidden post area before or after the expand post ellipses that reads: "Held for Moderation: Akismet Possible Spam"

If it is desirable to obscure the reason for the hiding the text "Queued for Moderation" would also serve to indicate that the post has been properly posted to Flarum and is not being shown for a well defined reason.

As it is the posts look to be lost in limbo, something that is a not infrequent occurrence on some other forum software (coughdiscoursecough)

Dominion

That's an interesting idea, Kulga .

I've added a note mentioning the request by accalia to an existing issue concerning feedback to the user on posts flagged by Akismet. He makes a valid point; we have seen an increased number duplicate posts stemming from such false positives.

As @Franz indicated, there's clearly room for improvement here. The current implementation is a rough and ready version whipped up to help manage the spam problem on this forum. So please don't think that this is an accurate representation of what it will look like in its final form. Your ideas for improving things are much appreciated!

Toby

Kulga Nice idea in theory, but from what I've seen in the real world a lot of spam is human-entered so reCAPTCHA is almost useless.

@accalia Sorry about your battle with Akismet. Unfortunately we don't currently collect the information necessary to report false positives back to Akismet, so it will probably be an ongoing issue until we get that fixed (presumably Akismet has an issue with your username/email address rather than your post content). It's slotted for beta 3.

Regarding your accalia suggestion, I think that's a good idea. @Dominion has helpfully made a note of it in our issue tracker. 🙂

Franz

In an act of enormous irony, Akismet decided to rate this post as spam. 😛

accalia

Franz Akismet seems to have it out for me right now

I can't think of why, it's not like i'm fully capable of generating over 2k posts/month.... oh wait, yes i am. :-D

For the record i am finding this amusing, although if akismet keep up with this i will find it... less so.

accalia

Silly accalia of a couple of seconds ago! you forgot to thank Franz for letting you borrow his posts for the visual aides!

Thanks Franz!

:-D

Franz

Sorry about that... 🙁

To get back to your question, though:
I agree, this needs to be changed (the Reports / Akismet extensions are not fully done at this time). How about making it look like the post is fully visible, though? That way, spammers don't realize they're already being caught until we suspend or delete them...

accalia

Franz

I think making the post fully visible would be worse than the current behavior.

As it is I'm assuming that i can see the post in its current state because they are mine and moderators can see them, but regular users can't?

If thats the case then it would be the equivalent to an automatic shadowban to simply show the post as normal to the posting user when its flagged as spam.

As it is, I knew that something was up when my posts went funny and I was able to bring this fact to the developers attention. If my posts simply appeared as normal I would simply have thought that everyone was ignoring me.

That would have been a worse user experience because i would not have been able to get out of the situation.

Franz

accalia That would have been a worse user experience because i would not have been able to get out of the situation.

I can understand that.
In an ideal world, however, where the only reports would be true positives generated by Akismet, that would be a nice experience for most (non-spammy) users, while not alerting the spammers that they've been caught.

Looks like we need to think this through a bit more. 😉

accalia

Franz In an ideal world, however, where the only reports would be true positives generated by Akismet

I agree that this would be an ideal world situation, however I've worked with Akismet enough to know that it will at least occasionally throw up false positives. Akismet is very good, I do not often see false positives, but i do see them.

I'm assuming that it caught me because up until today i've mostly been playing in the word association game thread which meant that my posts were generally short. Not a usual use case i will admit. ;-)

Kulga

I wonder - sorry if this is hijacking - if it's possible to have some kind of immediate appeal, say a reCaptcha saying (in a non-invasive way as to not let bots know it was marked as spam)

"This matches our spam control guidelines, take a moment to solve this puzzle (you won't be asked again!)

Then if you solve it - it's displayed. Then having this not occur to users of a certain whatever (high post, high likes, whatever).

accalia

Kulga That sounds like a reasonable solution.

There may want to be some sort of escalation in place, say get too many posts flagged for spam you can't captcha your way out of it anymore.

accalia

Dominion I've added a note mentioning the request by accalia to an existing issue concerning feedback to the user on posts flagged by Akismet.
Dominion Your ideas for improving things are much appreciated!

Many thanks! Glad i could help.

Dominion He makes a valid point

She actually, If it's not too much trouble. ;-)

Toby @accalia Sorry about your battle with Akismet.

No worries. I actually found it rather amusing. ;-)

Toby Unfortunately we don't currently collect the information necessary to report false positives back to Akismet,

Hmm... Sounds like i should roll up my developer sleeves and take a look at the code. Maybe I can help there.

Should brush up on my PHP anyway, it's been too long since i used that language for anything.

Toby presumably Akismet has an issue with your username/email address rather than your post content)

hmm.... that runs counter to my guess, but it is Akismet so anything's possible. :-) I'm just glad that we seem to be on better terms now.

Dominion

accalia She actually, If it's not too much trouble. ;-)

I beg your pardon! I'll try to keep that in mind for the future.

Toby

accalia Hmm... Sounds like i should roll up my developer sleeves and take a look at the code. Maybe I can help there.

That'd be great! Relevant issue.

accalia

Dominion

No worries, It's hard to tell, what with this being the internet.

There was no offense taken, so there's nothing to pardon!