If the SIAI is unable to subdue unfriendly spam bots then the prospects to impede superhuman uFAI look bleak ;-)
Who says these spam bots are unfriendly? Maybe they have figured out that the best way to help us is to convince us to buy their awesome products!
Of course, if that's the case, they aren't exactly doing a good job of it...
Who says these spam bots are unfriendly? Maybe they have figured out that the best way to help us is to convince us to buy their awesome products!
That's just stupid. An artificial, program-controlled computer isn't going to one day decide that the best way to help you is to convince you to blow all your money acquiring some random product.
We only have maybe 1 or 2 per day, and they get downvoted / reported failry quickly, so they're not a major nuisance yet. Still, the spam level may ratchet up quickly, so a preventive measure like a karma threshold would help.
What offence? I've never liked paperclipes, and I don't think anyone has ever accused me of such.
I want the disruptors thrown out just as much as you! It's really annoying when people post off-topic comments, even if it's just to be "funny".
papercliping the section (no offence clippy),
What offence? I've never liked paperclipes
The poster meant to write "paperclipping". You may want to modify your source code to be able to correctly interpret typos and misspellings. Indeed, humans tend not even to notice differences this subtle, which is why many of them are going to read your response as "I've never liked paperclips", and I know you don't want them to think that.
I read it as "I've never liked paperclippers" which is plausibly true. (Although of course Clippy likes them right up until the point where they run out of stuff to make paperclips from, after that they're just so many atoms.)
They seem to hang around rather long, at least in the order of 24 hours. Could posts that receive enough flags become hidden from everyone automatically until a mod takes a look? Maybe add some heuristic where flags from brand new users aren't counted towards this system to work against sockpuppet gaming.
That would work, but a karma threshold would work just as well (for the problem at hand at least), and be easier to implement.
Yep, and it could be tiny -- five points would probably be a high enough threshold if the goal is just to eliminate jewelry spam and the "everything else is just another trainsmash of the Gregorian Frequency of disconnected heart bio-rhythm" guy.
Hmm, so to be attack-resistant you'd need:
The obvious question to me is: why is Discussion getting this spam where main LW didn't and doesn't?
I have a "ban" button on the main LW site, for use removing viagra ads and the like. I have no similar button in the discussion section. Maybe they're both receiving comparable amounts, but there's no removal mechanism here.
See http://lesswrong.com/r/lesswrong/about/moderators and http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/about/moderators for list of moderators.
Poke one of them to poke me if you think you deserve to be a moderator.
I'm mean most of us would like a friendly bot to chat with, but this is just paperclipping the section (no offence clippy), by now its starting to be a real trivial inconvenience for me and it reduces my desire to check out new topics.