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Spam in the Reader forum

LEGEND ,
May 01, 2011 May 01, 2011

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The Reader forum has been spammed since about 10 hours ago. Despite the several reports in the Spam thread, the spam messages are still piling up. This is making the forum nearly unusable.

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LEGEND ,
May 01, 2011 May 01, 2011

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Quite frankly, I don't feel encouraged to continue reporting spam.

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Community Expert ,
May 02, 2011 May 02, 2011

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Now that it is Monday, maybe someone will be able to do something... before the weight of spam brings the forum(s) down again

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LEGEND ,
May 02, 2011 May 02, 2011

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Well, all the spam in the Reader forum that was reported yesterday had been removed earlier this morning...

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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I marked this "question" as Answered because the offending posts had been eliminated. However, today the Reader forum has been piling up spam messages for more than five hours, and nothing happens, despite reports.

I always understood that one way to discourage spammers is to eliminate their messages as soon as posible.

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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I can imagine it's no one's first job to remove spam.  Seems to me they do keep up - sooner or later - so it's hard to be critical.

As far as it getting it removed quickly, that was the motivation for my suggestion in the "Much Ado About Spamming" thread.

-Noel

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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Noel Carboni wrote:

I can imagine it's no one's first job to remove spam.  ..

Shouldn't it be? Regardless, 5 hours is a very long time, and it discourages people reporting....

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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Sure, but I can't begin to imagine a company funding such a position.  That there are paid Admins at all who read these threads is a blessing.

You'll notice that virtually all the moderators are unpaid.

The whole idea of forums is that you get your smart/experienced users to help your other users for a LOT less money than it would cost to have competent people manning telephone support.

-Noel

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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Noel Carboni wrote:

Sure, but I can't begin to imagine a company funding such a position.  That there are paid Admins at all who read these threads is a blessing.

You'll notice that virtually all the moderators are unpaid.

The whole idea of forums is that you get your smart/experienced users to help your other users for a LOT less money than it would cost to have competent people manning telephone support.

-Noel

Funding such a position should be considerably cheaper than implementing a set of properly working forums. I frequent other forums that do not collapse under spam attacks, that don't have to eliminate functionalities to avoid disaster produced by spammers, where bugs are corrected in quite a lot less than two years, forums equiped with properly working search engines, ... And where moderators are as unpaid as the ones here.

I do not consider these forums as a gift graciously granted by Adobe to its users, who have to accept them gratefully and silently with all their shortcomings. It is users (including moderators) who are giving their time and expertise for free, thus replacing a virtually unexistent support service that, as you say, would cost Adobe a LOT of money. Therefore, a minimum of courtesy from Adobe would be to strive to make these forums functional, to avoid making the act of helping a real chore.

I think that all old timers know and fully appreciate the work of JC and his team in trying to keep these forums working as decently as possible. Unfortunately, their hands seem to be tied ever since the forums began being powered by this Jive software that has not been updated in about two years -we are still using version 2.5.16.

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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Claudio González wrote:

Funding such a position should be considerably cheaper than implementing a set of properly working forums.

That statement doesn't really stand up to scrutiny very well.  The ONE THING that companies are constantly trying to reduce is labor cost.  Employees are expensive!

Let's say a full time position to delete spam would pay $30K.  Most administrators roughly double that to determine the "burden rate", so the company would be laying out $60K / year for this ONE PERSON.  That's not a one-time cost, but $5,000 a month, every month from now on.  Those are not tiny numbers.

On the other hand, loading it as part-time low-priority responsibility onto a forum Admin who has tons of other responsibilities doesn't seem to cost nearly as much.

-Noel

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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Noel, and what would be the cost of kicking out Jive, getting some serious software to manage these forums, and start all over again (which would need highly specialized employees, and would make needless to have someone exclusively for removing spam messages)?. I apologize for asking you, but you seem to be the expert in calculating costs, and I simply have no idea, not to mention the fact that I live in another country. However, I suspect that it would be quite a lot more expensive, but that's just a naive guess.

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LEGEND ,
May 03, 2011 May 03, 2011

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I'm not trying to duck the question, but estimating a task like that would take a full-time professional planner/administrator a good bit of time (and more information than I have on hand) to do properly.

I worked in corporate high tech for 29 years, by the way, before starting my own company 6 years ago.

-Noel

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LEGEND ,
May 04, 2011 May 04, 2011

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If I understand you correctly (estimating a task like that would take a full-time professional planner/administrator a good bit of time ... to do properly), it would seem that my previous statement

Funding such a position should be considerably cheaper than implementing a set of properly working forums.

does stand up to scrutiny very well. It only took you minutes to estimate the cost of of having a spam remover, but just estimating the cost of implementing a set of properly working forums would be very expensive...

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LEGEND ,
May 05, 2011 May 05, 2011

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I hate to state the obvious, but the amounts matter, Claudio.  A manager planning a project for weeks then executing the plan is still very likely going to be less expensive than hiring a full-time person whose job it is to take up the slack from now on for the bad implementation currently in place.

Hey, I'm not the one making decisions to save money by reducing employees.  That's an industry-wide concept.

And if you feel you have the solutions, I encourage you to continue to express them here - not everyone has to agree with them for them to be valuable.  I'm certainly not trying to suppress any thoughts, but I will probably comment if I don't happen to agree with you.

-Noel

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LEGEND ,
May 05, 2011 May 05, 2011

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You wouldn't be forgetting costs such as the cost of breaking a contract with Jive, and then making a new contract with another company and start from almost zero, would you? But I agree, I am no expert in the matter, so I can be totally wrong in assuming that hiring a low rate employee to eliminate spam for as long as we see properly implemented forums is less expensive than redoing the forums. Or even is assuming that the present ones cannot be mended with the present software, or we would have a decent search engine from the beginning, and we wouldn't have two year old bugs.

And no, I don't think I have the solution, but feel fairly sure that the ever growing number of workarounds that are necessary to compensate for the poor design and implementation of this site -leading, amongst other things, to its "temporary" crippling for safety reasons- are not a good solution; and that hiring a person to eliminate spam shouldn't be necessary.

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Advocate ,
May 05, 2011 May 05, 2011

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Claudio González wrote on 11/05/05 19:23:

But I agree, I am no expert in the matter, so I can be totally wrong in assuming that hiring a low rate employee to eliminate spam for as long as we see properly implemented forums is less expensive than redoing the forums.

So on hand hand you complain if it takes a few hours before spam is

removed, but on the other hand you think one employee is enough. How

many hours do you expect him to work per week? Would he get weekends off?

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LEGEND ,
May 05, 2011 May 05, 2011

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Based on the day/time of the start of this topic, it appears the role is expected to be 7 day coverage, possibly 24/7.

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LEGEND ,
May 05, 2011 May 05, 2011

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Jochem van Dieten wrote:

Claudio González wrote on 11/05/05 19:23:

But I agree, I am no expert in the matter, so I can be totally wrong in assuming that hiring a low rate employee to eliminate spam for as long as we see properly implemented forums is less expensive than redoing the forums.

So on hand hand you complain if it takes a few hours before spam is

removed, but on the other hand you think one employee is enough. How

many hours do you expect him to work per week? Would he get weekends off?

It wasn't me who suggested hiring someone to delete spam messages; I have only being repeating that I think it woudld be much cheaper than redoing the forums. And I don't know if hiring one person would suffice; I only know that it would be much better than having none.  See also

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3659490#3659490

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LEGEND ,
May 06, 2011 May 06, 2011

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Claudio González wrote:

I only know that it would be much better than having none.


Perhaps an unfortunate choice of wording.  If I were the Admin and saw your implication here that there is no one managing spam, I might be tempted to ask:

"What am I, chopped liver?"

-Noel

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LEGEND ,
May 06, 2011 May 06, 2011

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I was obviously talking about hiring a full time person of low rank to work exclusively in deleting spam messages: in the present circumstances, it would better having one than none. Fortunatelly, Admin knows how I feel about what he and his team do to keep these forums clean and working, so there was no chance of being misinterpreted by him.

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LEGEND ,
May 06, 2011 May 06, 2011

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Claudio González wrote:

I was obviously talking about hiring a full time person of low rank to work exclusively in deleting spam messages: in the present circumstances, it would better having one than none. Fortunatelly, Admin knows how I feel about what he and his team do to keep these forums clean and working, so there was no chance of being misinterpreted by him.

Instead of hiring a person, how about masking some users moderators of these forums?  They should decide if the message is appropriate or not.  Microsoft is doing this quite successfully so why can't Adobe do a test run?

I have noticed that somebody is moderating these forums because two of my messages from DW have been deleted because I mentioned Microsoft's Expression Web (under $100) and free version Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007 for a newbie to get into HTML/CSS before spending about $200 on Dreamweaver.

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Adobe Employee ,
May 06, 2011 May 06, 2011

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Messages such as those (Microsoft Expression Web) should not have been deleted. Can you tell me approximately when they were deleted?

Thanks!

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LEGEND ,
May 07, 2011 May 07, 2011

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Maybe the idea of "specially enabled users" is not so bad after all. It shouldn't be too difficult to identify users who could qualify for this (just looking at the Spam thread should be enough), and send them PMs asking if they would be willing to collaborate. My idea is that they would just be enabled to remove what they think are obvious spam messages, which would not be really erased permanently but would remain for some time in a sort of reservoir from which they could be replaced in case someone with higher powers finds there have been mistakes. No further powers.

Is this worth discussing, and perhaps implementing?

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Mentor ,
May 07, 2011 May 07, 2011

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Claudio González wrote:

Maybe the idea of "specially enabled users" is not so bad after all. It shouldn't be too difficult to identify users who could qualify for this (just looking at the Spam thread should be enough), and send them PMs asking if they would be willing to collaborate. My idea is that they would just be enabled to remove what they think are obvious spam messages, which would not be really erased permanently but would remain for some time in a sort of reservoir from which they could be replaced in case someone with higher powers finds there have been mistakes. No further powers.

Is this worth discussing, and perhaps implementing?

I have run across post I would love to delete on the spot.

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LEGEND ,
May 07, 2011 May 07, 2011

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Which doesn't mean that it is blattant spam...

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