Feedback About forum spammers...

There doesn't go many days by that I don't see all kinds of nonsense spam on these forums, mainly advertisements for unrelated products.

What I really wonder though is could Unity take similar approach as some other forums (for example Unreal's) do and actually force the first message or two from a new user to go through moderator approval and after that let those people post freely once you see it's not some nonsense bot on the other end?

 

The moderators here are not Unity employees. I believe they are just being helpful in their spare time. Requiring approval for first messages would dramatically increase their load. It would help the spammer issue, but would probably hurt the forum in other ways, since I would assume the mods don't just waste their time otherwise.

 

I wonder how big of difference that would be in current situation where mods still need to go over probably like half of the new user messages (since they are those spam messages reported by users). Now it's more of a burden for all users.

 

Half is probably an overestimate. Lots of new users here posting all the time. But what would most likely happen is spammers would adapt by making a clean first message, waste mod time approving it, then drop the spam afterward.

 

I haven't really seen this happening on forums that do the initial checks. Do remember that spam posts are made by bots, I doubt they even check if the messages go really through on forum x.

 

We see a fair amount of generic first posts, followed by later spam link posts, on this forum already.

 

Now we get the spam on already existing forum threads..

I still wonder... why can't unity do what others do and just block first messages from new users before someone looks them through?

 

Because they don't want to pay people for moderating the forum 24/7, and also don't want people who make their first post to have to wait until a moderator can validate their post.

 

I mean they are literally a publically traded company worth billions now, I dont think trying to skimp on paying for moderation is an option anymore.

Like, if its a matter of money, just invest in the damn community already. It looks really poor when prospective users come here, and see the level of spam there is. It makes it seem like some weird unofficial board.

I had to explain to the new junior we have that this is actually the official forum when I sent him a link to a thread here, as he pointed out that with the level of spam this must be an unofficial one. I am not surprised he believed that.

 

I'm pretty sure that people like @UnityMaru are not the ones holding the purse-strings, so there's probably not much to be gained from complaining on the forums. Yes, this could be fixed by just paying some mods to be on at certain times, and then adding a moderator queue for all new posts. Waiting up to 12 hours for your first post to show up would be fine, and paying some part-time moderators from different parts of the world to handle the mod queue for an hour here and there so the entire week was covered would be a tiny cost for a company at Unity's size.

But that's not how Unity rolls. The forum spam problem is for sure, 100% a result of Unity's DNA. Unity as a company is just completely and utterly unable to do simple solutions, like hiring some people to monitor their current online presence. They have to do a big solution that involves changing a platform that takes years. It's not about cost at all, it's about a company that "solves hard problems" instead of "solving the problem that needs to be solved".

This is in no way different from a bunch of the long-term problems with the engine itself, where simple, shorter term solutions are never selected if a longer term, more impressive solution is available, no matter how much longer and more uncertain the long-term solution is.

 

Hey I am in complete agreement and I certainly dont expect someone like @UnityMaru to take the blame seeing as they and most unity staff that interact on here are great

But I also do expect a company that is publically traded now, to have someone somewhere in the company keeping an eye on things like this, I doubt they are just letting problems in certain areas of a company this large and funded to run rampant (regardless of past behaviour when they were not making snow angels on a mountain of cash). I know that complaining here doesnt do much in the short term, but its all we have - I send these sorts of feedback on every survey that touches on this and also any point I get to provide feedback I do, but theres not much else we can do.

Im not about to just sit on my hands and do nothing or say nothing, because as the past has shown actually complaining on here does eventually get notice. I would argue a lot of the major changes that unity are making right now to recitfy issues in the engine and workflow and release cadence, have come from major complaint threads and posts here in the forum.

 

I have to agree here. Nobody here is suggesting this is something voluntary community moderators should be burdened with. This is official discussion forum for a 14 billion dollar business, you can't expect people to fix the obvious issue we have here while going unpaid. The issue is that there's no solution provided and overall impression of the place just suffers.

This forum is only place on the internet I use somewhat often that has this absurd amount of spam going on all around. And I use various professional software discussion forums from all kinds of levels, it's just this place that's really really bad when it comes to spam.

I also don't believe for a second those other places wouldn't get bots trying to spam things, they just deal with these things better. I haven't seen any good reason given why first message or two couldn't be manually filtered - especially since it works really well on other places that don't have this issue.

At very least you could enforce manual checks for first posts that actually embed links.

 

Hi Unity Team, I am new here. After the first view of the Forum.Unity.Com, I am so impressed by Unity Forum Managing Team. Of Course, Take action against spammers to stop spam on the forum.

 

that's easier to do in the unreal engine forums since it's less active. Actually, a lot less active.

 

The thing is, I don't know how much popular are "other" forums and how they are affected by spam, but consider high traffic of Unity forum itself, the spam is rather on the low volume in my opinion.

Mind this is for unity.com, rather strictly forum.unity.com


https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/unity.com

Sure spam is annoying and could be prevent in many cases.

 

Based on that though, why doesnt reddit have tons of spam then? Reddit has more traffic than this website, yet has virtually no spam compared.

Its because ultimately their process is better. I agree, it could be worse here given the traffic. But it definately could be better and I dont think we should just settle and say this is as good as it gets

 

Nailed it.

 

[Quotation TE="MadeFromPolygons, post: 6893183, member: 424621"]Based on that though, why doesnt reddit have tons of spam then? Reddit has more traffic than this website, yet has virtually no spam compared.

Its because ultimately their process is better. I agree, it could be worse here given the traffic. But it definately could be better and I dont think we should just settle and say this is as good as it gets [/QUOTE]

Yep there is to that. Reddid got active mods monitoring and heavy filtering, specially for first posters in a given category. To the point, I had to write to mods, asking, why my first genuine post is blocked multiple times. Only then after unlocking me, I could post it again. But do their mods get paid? I don't know.

On other hand, few years back in in other forun, I experienced they support necroing, for over year old post. Even tho, OP post was no more valid and misleading. I thought posting new and updated thread will be fine. How wrong I was back then. Not sure which forum was it, but one of the popular ones.

 

After seeing few spams past 2 days. I do wonder why new users are allowed, creating new post like rabbits. Literary there was new spam account, which created multiple new threads every minute with links, across multiple forum boards.

 

Yeah a timer for new users which lifts after a small amount of decent posts would be great - not sure how feasible it is with the current system though

 

Reddit has thousands of mods/admins, each monitoring their own little corner of the site.

Also for Reddit, the forum is the product. For Unity a few spam messages on the forum doesn't have a direct impact on their business.