HN Explorer

Ask PG: Spam Control on HN

7 points by knightinblue ↗ HN
Given HN's incredibly easy signup process (not even a CAPTCHA), one would think that spammers would be going crazy in here. But I haven't seen a single bit of spam, either in the comments or new articles lineup.

How is this achieved? I mean what kind of spam filters?

17 comments

[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 47.2 ms ] thread
noodle
i, and probably many other people, flag anything that looks like spam.
knightinblue
so does a comment/article immediately get deleted when someone clicks 'flag'? or does it get sent to the moderators for review?

If it's the latter, I thought I'd still see the comment/article till it's deleted. But I haven't seen any spam anywhere.

I'm just saying that it can't be solely due to human editing.

ojbyrne
There is a "showdead" option in your profile (though there might be a minimum karma required). Then you can see stuff that's been flagged (presumably beyond some threshold).
knightinblue
Yeah, I have it turned on and I see the dead articles, but those are more along the grounds of readers subjectively disagreeing with questionable ideas/content.

I was talking about never seeing comments/links that are universally agreed upon as spam, like links to viagra sites etc.

icey
Well, there's also a question of scale at play. I don't think HN gets enough visitors yet to make it worthwhile for spammers to target here instead of say, reddit.
rms
It's also harder to get follow links here than at reddit.
ojbyrne
I see noticeable amounts of spam in the "New" section. Sometimes anyway.
Shamiq
Admins here are amazing. Distributed responsibility, easy to see flagging, and an active user set all help the keep spam to a minimum.
knightinblue
So no comment spam filters like akismet or anything?

Then I'm incredibly impressed at the effectiveness. I just thought that since HN has the same basic functionality as reddit, it must have a far better set of spam filters than reddit.

Shamiq
Comment spam will get downvoted to hell. And the current users of HN care about the quality of HN. :)
Shamiq
Comment spam will get downvoted to hell. And the current users of HN care about the quality of HN. :)
pierrefar
I've seen a tiny bit of spam, and usually by the time I refresh the page, it's gone.

Sometimes in UK morning time, the spam lasts, oooh, 2 minutes instead of the usual ms. It's even faster these days than a few months ago.

And the community here is very zealous about the quality of submissions, and I bet a lot of people flag spam promptly.

pg
IP, site, and account bans catch maybe 80% of spam. The rest gets killed by human editors.
rms
One thing that helps is that this is a dumb site to spam. There's no SEO/traffic benefit from submitting crap here.