Spam filter has gone insane

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I just attempted to post a dev question that included links to the Graphviz documentation. I wasn’t allowed to do that “You cannot post links to this host”, which is insane on the face of it, but by editing out the links I was able to get the post to go through.

However, my attempt appears to have driven the spam-filter insane, as it just went through and hid ALL of my old posts if they included so much as a single link.

All of these are newly-hidden, despite not being new posts:

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That’s not even funny, Discourse:

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I tried fixing it, and releasing spam-filtered posts. I hope it works. I added www.graphviz.org and forum.graphviz.org to domains that are not counted for link spam scoring.

I realize the world of spam is complex, and this decision might need to be changed.

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Many thanks, and I do appear to be out of spammer jail.

That list might need to be upgraded with just graphviz.org, since the documentation can also be accessed via https://graphviz.org/docs/something. (And it doesn’t redirect to www.graphviz.org if accessed that way, AFAICT.)

Although, if it’s a list of domains, just graphviz.org alone might be fine. Hopefully we don’t have to worry about anyone hijacking part of the graphviz.org domain for spam purposes!

Oh, and gitlab.com might be good to have, as well. (Or gitlab.com/graphviz/*, if you can get that specific.)

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The hosts I put in the Discourse link spam detection whitelist disappeared. I don’t understand why.

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Yeah, I dunno. There doesn’t appear to be a lot of good information about how any of that stuff works, even on the Discourse forum. The only relevant thing I could find was this thread about the automated message implying that the posts were actually flagged by humans, not the system: Auto-immune heavy-handedness: Anti-spam rules can appear to be overzealous community flagging, stymieing community - #7 by spirobel - ux - Discourse Meta

(Which is definitely an issue I noticed as well, and agree with. Unlike the first time around a month ago when one of my posts was hidden for containing links, where the block message said something about the Akismet spam filters (IOW, clearly indicated that it was an automatic filter), this time the messages all said this:

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Which is a terrible way to report an automated decision, IMHO. But the Discourse staff don’t seem particularly troubled, based on that thread.

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We appreciate Discourse generously supports us for free.

I’ll investigate our options to improve the situation.

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AFAICT Discourse provides no email notification to the moderators when something like this happens either. I had no idea your posts had been hidden until this thread.

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I re-entered several link spam whitelist entries for graphviz.org. I think I forgot to press the appropriate button to commit changes the first time I tried. Maybe this will improve the situation.

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