each time my post gets flagged for spam and 3 escort spams get on the main index, I melt a little

Jan Cumps said:

I flagged 3 posts this week-end because they were for escorts, and they are still up

Are they? Could you provide a link so I can check that? As far as I can tell they've gone into the abuse queue on verint.

Jan Cumps said:

I wrote a nice blog post this week-end about an industrial sensor, related to a road test, and it's off to the spam queue.

Yep... I had to raise the 'abusive link count' which didn't catch the escort spam which had just under the limit, and then other content gets caught for different reasons. Meanwhile there's still spam content that does get caught.

I'm not a fan of how Verint's classifying the spam or its 'reputation system' (and neither are other customers of Verint). There are changes to it, but they're in the next version of the platform, and we're moving to that later this year.

We need a way of whitelisting trusted users, and I don't have that yet (verint believes it should be the reputation system but it doesn't appear to work).

cstanton said:

We need a way of whitelisting trusted users

Yes. That would solve the spam vs genuine posts enigma. And it would give me the endorphins that I'm entitled to when pressing "Post" after creative labour.
Seeing your post go to the queue is a downer - just when you're excited about releasing it. That's why I posted this.

Jan Cumps said:

Seeing your post go to the queue is a downer - just when you're excited about releasing it. That's why I posted this

Thanks for sharing how you feel, it's valid.

I thought I was the only person who got that rush?

I think I flagged the same escort spam as Jan (unless there was a lot more!), does it immediately go into quarantine when one person reports it, or does it take several users? 

Because, I too could still see the spam even after I reported it, but I just assumed that it was cached or something - I didn't realize others would still be able to see spam after one person reports it).

shabaz said:

does it immediately go into quarantine when one person reports it, or does it take several users? 

It takes more than one person to report it for it to go straight into the quarantine.

It has to be that way to prevent abuse from members, of which I've seen a lot of content go into the 'possibly abusive' queue by equally spammy users reporting legitimate content.

They're supposed to be famous for dodgy activity detection, it's one of their core businesses, I guess although on the one hand dodgy activity detection is supposed to pick out the anomalies in user activity (e.g. employees that act well for a long time, and then secretly start committing fraud), on the other hand for collaboration systems the system ought to trust more users that have not engaged in dodgy activity over repeated transactions (transaction being blog or comment writing in this context), so that manual whitelists would be an exception than a rule, but I guess they are still refining the major and the subtle differences between (say) financial systems, and more open collaboration systems. Interesting topic from a tech perspective, although of course it can get frustrating for users.