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Bad spam filtering
A spammer was able to post the very same spam 3 times within 15 minutes - all identical posts with exactly the same title and the same user. It seems very trivial to completely flood the site with trash this way.
This shouldn't be possible to do for any user, spammer or not. Why even allow duplicate titles on the site?
3 answers
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The following users marked this post as Works for me:
| User | Comment | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Lundin | (no comment) | Sep 14, 2026 at 09:12 |
We deployed a change today that should catch these now. For users below certain thresholds which we'd rather not publish for spammers to read here, new posts are checked against existing posts anywhere on the network and blocked if they match. We also block any posting by users below those thresholds if there are any active or helpful spam flags against other posts.
There's more we could do here, but let's start with this. Spam is a moving target so I expect our mitigations will be too.
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In addition to simple rate limits, what if we could require some form of vetting after a user's first post? For example, first posts from new users go into a queue, so curators and moderators have attention drawn to them. Then if the first interaction with the post from a curator or moderator is not to mark it as spam, the user then gets to continue posting (up to the usual rate limit).
Limits can be adjusted
Many Codidact communities start all new users with the Participate Everywhere ability, which raises the rate limits for new users. However, Software Development no longer does this, so a new user is subject to 3 questions and 5 answers per day. It appears that this new user hit the maximum of 3 questions and then posted an answer instead.
Either of these limits can be changed, given a Meta discussion and community consensus.
Duplicate titles are probably not the problem
If you would prefer to continue to allow most new users to post 3 questions and 5 answers per day, but block duplicate posts, that seems easy for a spammer to work around. I don't have a better suggestion, I just can't see blocking duplicate titles making a meaningful difference.
This particular user was not deterred by hitting the question limit, so I would expect them to try modifying the title if told it was a duplicate. Silently failing without saying why could help, but I wouldn't want to see that implemented since innocent title duplicates will sometimes occur, and such users should be informed of why their post is rejected. Also, most spam posts don't have duplicate titles. Random scattering of spam posts across several communities seems common, and preventing duplicate titles on different communities doesn't seem like a good idea.
I'd like to hear more suggestions of ways to automate the reduction of spam, but I don't personally see a benefit to checking titles for duplicates.
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