Spam patrol page:
https://www.inaturalist.org/users/recent?description=yes&ids=no&obs=no
Is it worth spending time doing this?
2 Likes
my understanding is all new profiles are hidden but new obs are not. So if the spammer is making posts they are worth banning or marking because once they are marked as spam the obs donât show either. If itâs the sort of account that has a spam profile but doesnât post, maybe it isnât valuable to bother
1 Like
By definition, none of the accounts on the âProbably spamâ filter have made observations.
3 Likes
is there value in ârescuingâ the real accounts that fall in there then? Or is that rare or they can get out anyway?
2 Likes
One reason I can think of is that many scientists would use iNat for data collection etc, and its difficult to filter through all the observations of preference and doing due diligence on the spam accounts with spam observations.
3 Likes
Debatable. These profile descriptions are being hidden, so they are not serving the spammerâs purpose, but they are still visible to curators, which is annoying to curators, and as Charlie pointed out, these are still active user accounts that spammers could use to make more spam on iNat. You could also argue that by marking these accounts as spam you are helping train Akismet to recognize the kind of spam we receive at iNat, but given how bad a job Akismet seems to do on our spam and the enormous corpus of training data they presumably have already, you could just as easily argue that Akismet doesnât need more data. Akismetâs a bit of a black box. You could also argue that by marking spammers you are helping iNat build itâs own corpus of spam that we could use to make our own classifier at some point in the future, but I have to admit thereâs little enthusiasm for that on the development team at present.
So, up to you. I personally mark a few spammers a day out of a compulsive desire to get rid of them, but I donât think my motivations for doing so are all that rational.
6 Likes
That being the case, the following is probably not worth a feature request. I had been thinking though, two things would make spam patrol (for what itâs worth) much more efficient:
- ability to search user description contents. ?q=âTo learn more, go to website:â would find about 95% of the stuff I have been flagging.
- ability to select and flag batches of said results â knowing that one would still want to do a final visual scan for any false-positives first.
The Recent Users page is a great tool for all kinds of other queries, though, so definitely keep it around, either way.
And know that I also share some of that irrational compulsion! 
2 Likes
I sometimes rescue an account when itâs crystal clear that itâs legit, but itâs visually lost in a sea of spam accounts, and I want to make sure I (and others) donât accidentally flag it as spam. Otherwise I leave them alone and let them post (to get out of the list) or not.
1 Like
I donât know how Akismet works and how often it runs on the same recent users, but some spammers create an account and fill the profile with spam later. Iâve gone through the same recent users several times and I always found new spam. The usernames are always like this name_number_name.
1 Like
Yes, I notice the same thing. Every so often Iâll go back through the past few weeks, and find an occasional spam account that Iâm sure wasnât there before. The descriptions almost always end with âTo learn more, go to website:â â which I wish was searchable in the filters.
Even the ability to mark a bunch of things (think a check box) and then hit the button once to mark as spam or not spam, then confirm. Would save quite a lot of scrolling down and up.
4 Likes
Yes, exactly my wish too!
1 Like
I have a related question under âFeature Requestsâ here.
One point about spam accounts, while they donât clutter if theyâre not visible, as long as theyâre searchable by search engines, they will accomplish one of their main goals: to increase the number of links pointing to their site and drive up their SEO.
As long as this is happening, the rate of creation of spam accounts wonât get much better.
4 Likes
Thanks @bouteloua!
1 Like
@bouteloua adding my thanks, and wondering if this topic should be moved into the Curators category?
2 Likes
One thing to note, until either the automated spam catcher tags them, which has likely been missed if they appear in the new user list, or a curator manually flags them, the account remains something the creator can access and use, if they wish to for instance create spam observations, journal posts, comments etc as some do.
Once manually marked, they are locked out of this.
3 Likes