Reporting Profiles

marcia_

 There needs to be a button to report spam profiles.

 Overnight a poster has made about 10 threads and half that comments on other threads which are obvious spam. Of course we can report each thread but there should be an option to report a profile. 

GingerTim

46 threads now!

masonic

Looks like an existing user with good reputation whose account has been compromised. AIUI the spam button affects the profile's "score", so maybe there is a way to temporarily lock or hide an account that receives a large volume of spam reports in a short space of time. Though I understand this could be abused by a coordinated group of forum users if they were so minded.

Edit: Also, there seems to be a partner in crime going through thanking the posts: https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/profile/reactions/Akettop

elsien

Not sure what’s happening to MSE Spam filter which is letting all this rubbish through. 

Emmia

I've been reporting as spam. As my reports hit the magic number of 5 spam reports on a few threads they've disappeared. 

Hopefully others will report the rest to get to the magic number.

MSE_Stephen

Good morning everyone

Hopefully that's all gone now.

In this situation the best course of action is always to click the 'Spam' button on every spam post you see. This should help train the automatic filters.

The filters have never been particularly great with this type of spam, but there's sometimes something we can tweak manually, so I'll look into that.

marcia_ said:

 There needs to be a button to report spam profiles.

This wouldn't actually be very helpful, as the Forum Team would just get a link to the profile and would have to look for posts that break our rules - so it's actually extra steps for both the reporter and the Forum Team than if you just report one of the spam posts, as that puts a spam post right in front of us in the ticket.
You can mention in the report that the user is posting it repeatedly.

sammyjammy

But if we use the spam button we don't get to send a report?

MSE_Stephen

sammyjammy said:

But if we use the spam button we don't get to send a report?

Hi @sammyjammy

If you're asking if when you click "Spam" you should also report, it's always best to report if you think someone hasn't already let us know about a problem. Err on the side of reporting.

We do check on our Spam queue (that shows posts that have been removed by the spam button) regularly, so we may still ban spammers that have only had posts removed with the Spam button even if no reports have come in. 

But if you're asking from a technical side - 
I believe if you're one of the first people to click "Spam", you should still be able to also click "Report" to report the post.

If you're one of the later people to click the "Spam" button on a post, that might make the post disappear - so if you definitely want to report the post it might be better to click "Report" first, then "Spam"