The ‘Recent Users’ screen can be used to flag spam accounts as spammers.
Currently this can only be done one account at a time by clicking the ‘Flag As Spammer’ button and then clicking OK on the confirmation screen. The ‘Probably Spam’ selector in the top right allows one to filter and show only accounts that have a description, but no obs or IDs. The majority of these are spam, but not all.
Some suggestions to improve the process of identifying and flagging spam accounts:
Add a checkbox that selects all records shown, allowing the user to unselect individual records, and then a method of flagging all selected records as spam, along the lines of message selection in Gmail. I’m often confronted with a full screen of spam accounts and it’s a waste of time to have to flag and confirm each individually.
Filter for descriptions containing a hyperlink. Most false positives in the ‘Probably Spam’ category come from users with a description and no obs or IDs. These descriptions almost never include a hyperlink. In contrast spam accounts almost always include a hyperlink in the description. If this can be filtered for, it would massively reduce the false positives.
Thanks for this! – it’s pretty much along the lines of a suggestion I made (but did not follow through on) in this thread.
Also in that thread there is discussion about whether it is even worth flagging the spam accounts that come up in the “Probably Spam” filter, given that they are already hidden from everyone except curators. But I still find it satisfying to flag them anyway…
Since some legitimate users include hyperlinks in their descriptions, my suggestion was to make the search capability a little more general on the Description field. For example, if one could generate a parameter &q="To learn more, go to website:" in the search URL, that would filter probably 99%+ of true positives, and virtually no false positives.
Even just being able to tick a box to mark all shown users as spam, and be able to manually unselect the few that are not would be a massive time saving.
I wholeheartedly agree with this suggestion. It’s hard enough to keep up with the spammers, it would be nice to be able to flag them an entire page at a time.
