Spam prevention - algorithm block more posts than before

I can´t say a lot, but the hunch is that more often than before 😊

This topic came to my mind, when we saw today two posts going to spam with no reason. No urls, no swearwords, no nothing. I think there’s something to this 🤔

Hi Suvi and everyone, this can happen - an automated system like this will get it wrong sometimes, and there’s no easy way to determine exactly what’s going on under the hood.  The best action to take is to simply mark as ‘not spam’ as the algorithm will learn from this, and will hopefully adjust to not make the same error again.  If it seems like it’s happening more than normal and is causing concern I do recommend creating a ticket with our Support team as they can dig a bit more deeply and can relay feedback to Akismet (our 3rd party spam fighting algorithm provider) if needed.  

Thanks ​@Kenneth R.

I am sorry but I and we have feeling that it doesn´t learn anything 😀

I think I have created a ticket (Maybe once or twice? If I remember correctly, hopefully!), and I have got response like “there is nothing we can do”.

And this is why this is difficult case - active or superusers are annoyed and we can´t do anything for it. I can only disable pre moderation.

​@revote It certainly is hard to know for sure if or when it is learning.  

There’s a practice that I often recommend, and you’ve probably done or thought of doing it yourself already, but if you have active members who are frustrated by false positives, you can create a custom role that exempts members from the spam checker and auto-assign that role relatively early in the rank structure.  That way, anyone who has at least reached a certain minimal threshold where you’re fairly confident you would have spotted them as a spammer by then, will always be exempt.

Thanks, I didn´t know about this. I have done it now to our community. Although this isnt the best solution, I think this was ok workaround.

Btw, today one post from our moderator was marked as a spam. User with Moderator primary role.

Hey ​@revote - could you PM me the link to the topic where your Moderator got a post flagged as spam?

I can, but I asked this from Support and they said that Moderators & Community Managers & Admins -roles are not bypassed from spam filter. They didnt know why this is so.

They should be bypassed, so I will raise an idea about this.

Hey ​@revote - yes I heard that from them too, and I’ve pinged our Product team as I also find it really strange if that’s the case.

Hi ​@revote - our Product team just confirmed to me that Admins, CMs and Mods should indeed be exempt from the spam checker.  What you encountered is a bug, and we’re fixing it.