Forum is full of spam

// We could also cast a vote to bring vBulletin back ;)

the spam has been pretty bad indeed. What's odd is that it only seem to affect the developer part of the forum....

peterdedecker said:

// We could also cast a vote to bring vBulletin back ;)

I realize this is tongue-in-cheek, but vbulletin had a ton of problems and they were right to move away from it. Half the time the forum would reject posted code (as opposed to 1% of the time now.)

I wish they had moved to nodebb or discourse, like I suggested when they announced the forums were changing. Those platforms are cleaner, faster, more modern and have much better support for mobile.

Additionally, they can support *fast* infinite scrolling with the ability to jump to any part of the discussion instantly (using a custom scrollbar implementation which also has the ability to select a numbered comment), which combines the best features of pagination and infinite scrolling.

The Suunto forum uses nodebb, and they have posts with hundreds or thousands of replies. Imagine trying to navigate a post that long here.

They also have a feature request forum T_T.

These are just "PROLIFIC" developers, man ;)

see also: forums.garmin.com/.../hook-up-these-forums-to-stopforumspam

and here we go again: forums.garmin.com/.../official-law-assignment-assistance-uk-ensures-the-best-legal-assistance

peterdedecker said:

What's odd is that it only seem to affect the developer part of the forum....

No, it affects all parts of the forum, but fortunately there are some volunteer moderators who clean up the mess very promptly, often within seconds, unlike here on the dev section. Namely, I have to thank seilogramp for his hard work, taking him certainly couple of hours every day, weekends including. Unfortunately he has no privileges to delete spam on the dev forums.

Personally, I am trying to help too, by searching and reporting the spam (reporting as "abusive"). It helps the moderators with removing it, although on the dev forum, it takes long time, and there are still many spam messages that were reported multiple times since long time ago and not taken care of.

I also do not understand why there are no automated measures done directly on the forum administration level. To cope with the spam a little bit better, I wrote a Chromium extension, detecting and suppressing most of the spam on the user end. Not ideal, but better than nothing, and it helps reporting the spam better. I posted about it here:

https://forums.garmin.com/apps-software/mobile-apps-web/f/garmin-connect-web/377486/forum-helper-browser-extension 

Or also directly in Chrome's webstore

trux said:

Unfortunately he has no privileges to delete spam on the dev forums.

It would be good to have experienced moderators such as seilogramp granted access to moderation. Developer profiles such as flocsy becoming a moderator for just the dev section seems also very acceptable to me. As long as the actual content moderation doesn't become overzealous we wouldn't have an issue with either of these options. 

Deleting spam posts doesn't sound like a core task for a moderator to take on, reaching out to the developer of the forum software asking for a more structural solution should be considered.... Personally I have good experience with Askimet to handle "pure spam", maybe there exists already an extension for the forum software to install this as a plugin???

peterdedecker said:

Deleting spam posts doesn't sound like a core task for a moderator to take on, reaching out to the developer of the forum software asking for a more structural solution should be considered....

From what I heard (second-hand info), it is what has been worked on since a longer time, but it does not progress as fast as expected.

As far as the Connect IQ developer forums go, Kyle.ConnectIQ and I have been working to remove the spam as we see it, and you're right—it seems to be on the rise. If it were up to me, I would moderate all new users and require approval to post, but the forums aren't owned by the Connect IQ team so we can't impose that kind of restriction ourselves.

Back in the vBulletin days, we did have a couple of volunteer moderators to help in the Connect IQ area specifically, and I'd be willing to promote a couple of active users to that role to help with spam if anyone is interested, but I don't want to foist this on anyone because it's definitely a chore. I'm not personally familiar with seilogramp, but I'll talk to some internal folks about him. I'm not opposed to having non-developers help moderate content, but there was a point in the past where we had a user/moderator that was moderating content they thought was spam or hackers simply because they saw code snippets and didn't understand what they were looking at, heh.

Aside from that, I'm engaging with Garmin IT to see what else can be done.

Hello Brandon.ConnectIQ, there are couple of spam posts, already reported in the past a few times, but still hanging out there. At some of them, the spam links are well hidden, and you may need to use the above mentioned GFH extension to see them, or to check the HTML source code.

• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/1911/watchapp-nupogodi/1758640#1758640 (a big spammers nest with 8 spam posts from different users)
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/1911/watchapp-nupogodi/1758640#pifragment-1298=2 (second page of the same thread with another spam post)
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/322213/my-game---movement-battle---collect-ideas/1717314#1717314 (spam link hidden under a dot, visible with GFH)
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/app-ideas/194773/extended-display-for-edge-on-tv-tablet-mobile/1210046#1210046 (again a spam link in the post of user 7854593 hidden under a dot, and another spam in the post of 8008713)
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/382913/portable-speakers-revolutionizing-audio-experience-on-the-go 
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/382914/pos-terminals-revolutionizing-retail-and-payment-solutions 
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/382782/automatic-ticket-machine-streamlining-ticketing-operations-with-advanced-automation 
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/showcase/382783/electric-toothbrush-revolutionizing-oral-care-with-advanced-technology 
• https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/i/bug-reports/unable-to-get-content-from-spotify-to-update-or-download-music-to-the-device 

There are certainly more than that on the CIQ forum, but that's what I have in my records at this moment.

I am willing to help with clearing the spam, as long as I do not have to cope with other moderating tasks. I have some experience with fighting spam from the programming side too (for example did some work on Apache's SpamAssassin).