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As of last night (between 19:00 and 21:00 UTC 07 January 2024) the discussion feature has started to be flooded with spam. Prior to that time, there were maybe 250~ posts on the Discussions Page, there are now ~1,400!

The problem here is due to several contributors:

  1. Poor/non-existant moderation tools for curators
  2. No minimum rep requirement to post in Discussions
  3. No rate limits on posts on Discussions, even for 1 rep users (exhibit A)

We know that moderation tooling is bad on the Discussions feature, but now it's being heavily abused by the parties that we knew would abuse it. There are too many posts for the community to flag at this point, and in truth, the volume in short periods of time is too (flagging 2-3 posts a minute is not sustainable, especially when red-flags don't exist).

Stack Overflow needs to address this immediately; the feature is now completely useless to anyone, as you can't find any content due to the volume of spam.

I suggest that a reputation requirement to post in discussions is implemented with immediate effect; this will stop the spam for new accounts (and new users posting discussions instead of questions). It doesn't have to be high, 15+ would be "enough" to counter the spammers seen here (who are all 1 rep users).

I also suggest that rate limiting is implemented (I've no idea why it isn't, in truth), which was suggested previously, Please implement a rate-limit for discussions, when a smaller spam campaign occurred. This should likely be the same as for posting content that isn't a discussion.

Moderation tools are still a must, and they are overdue as well. If spam flags were handled properly, and Charcoal works with Discussions (not sure if it does), the damage would minimal.

Right now, instead, even with 50 posts shown on a page, you won't find a discussion until you get to page 26 of 29... On the default of 15 posts a page, you have to go to page 86 of 95.

In the almost 2 hours since this post was made, there are now over 1,600 posts, so (based on a very small sample set) that's likely over 150 spam posts are being generated an hour, which is probably close to 3 posts a minute.

I want to bring attention to that although a CM (or several) are now working through the problem in terms of dealing with the posts, this is not a solution. The solution is still to put a stop in place; having a dedicated CM to do this work is awaste of resources when the tooling itself doesn't exist, and the stop(s) non-existant. They are fighting a losing battle. This only serves to lower the already understaffed team's resources, and not fixing the root problem is not fair to them, or the community.

In less than 24 hours well over 2,000 posts were generated by AI/bots, likely meaning that there were (at some points) significantly more than 100 posts an hour generated; that is not an small amount of work for an individual.

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    Given some of that spam is generated by AI maybe this was the whole idea of the CEO when he ventured onto the GenAI path. He might claim the current state of affairs as a huge success to the investors.
    – rene
    Commented Jan 8 at 10:27
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    I am surprised it took so long to mass spammers to figure it out Expanding Discussions: Let's talk about curation
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jan 8 at 10:39
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    I'm surprised even mods can't remove spam in collective discussions. Agree better tooling is needed.
    – Samuel Liew
    Commented Jan 8 at 10:47
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    They can (1), @SamuelLiew, but the problem is flag handling, for them, is awful in discussions. There also no auto delete after say 4 spam flags (can't remember what the threshold is). So 100 users could flag a post as spam and it'll still be there. Mods appear to be leaving the CMs to deal with Discussions, probably in part because moderating them is awful, and because they want the CMs to see how bad that is so they they want it fixed.
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 8 at 10:48
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    Related: Can we get a discussions flag-history?
    – A-Tech
    Commented Jan 8 at 11:10
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    >2,100 Discussions now. So that's >700 in 4 hours
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 8 at 13:17
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    Seems kind of sad, like weeds and invasive plants taking over a once proud but now abandoned property.
    – President James K. Polk
    Commented Jan 8 at 14:34
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    Looks like someone is finally dealing with it, as the number of discussions has dropped. Though they are fighting a losing battle, considering that content is still being generated.
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 8 at 14:36
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    @ThomA FWIW, I'd already pinged some CMs about it. I suspect they're taking bulk actions to tamp this down. PHP Discussions just dropped back to 26, and all the users of the flagged posts were destroyed by a CM or Dev.
    – Machavity Mod
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:27
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    Thanks, @Machavity . FWIW the spam is still being generated, however it's at least being deleted in a timely fashion. Though I have concerns that once the CMs get a different task, or finish for the day, then we'll going to see the flood return. The total volume is <24 hours was well over 2,000 posts in the end; having a dedicated "task force" to deal with >100 spam posts an hours is only going to be a drain on resources.
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:30
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    "In less than 24 hours well over 2,000 posts were generated by AI/bots" in addition to what you said, it also highlights that having dedicated CMs does not work as a measure. And this is not to fault the CMs. It's just an arms race where they are armed with a knife each, against an advancing army of well-armed robots.
    – VLAZ
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:58
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    @VLAZ similar to when your site gets hit by profile spammers: The spammer was able to create accounts quicker than I could nuke them. The mod-tooling for this task is so underpowered that for 1 destroyed account 5 new ones were created.
    – rene
    Commented Jan 8 at 17:22
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    "No minimum rep requirement to post in Discussions". I don't think this makes sense long term, but they added a rep requirement in the past to handle much smaller problems (ie, the Meta SE 2 rep requirement of many years ago.) I would definitely support this right now, until they get something in place to prevent this from happening again and again.
    – Laurel
    Commented Jan 8 at 17:59
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    "In less than 24 hours well over 2,000 posts were generated by AI/bots" - worth noting that this is on par with the rate of ordinary human-generated questions on the main site (a large percentage of which are still completely unacceptable).
    – Karl Knechtel
    Commented Jan 8 at 22:01
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    Is there any staff here? I just wanted to know what happened to those spam accounts. Deleted? Suspended? Just curious :)
    – Abdulla Nilam
    Commented Jan 9 at 9:47

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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This is even worse than you know. There's several major issues for mods

  1. Discussions have somehow created a worse version of comment-style flags. Despite the flag window looking similar to Q&A flags, the flags all go into the same "bucket", if you will. A post is merely "flagged". You either decline them or delete the post. In other words, there's no red flags that carry more weight than any others (or SpamRam, from what I can tell). It's worse in that at least Harassment or Unfriendly flags get follow-on flags. There's nothing to let us know this is happening.

  2. There's no API support. That means we can't feed them into Charcoal. We're not capturing any of the spam data flowing through discussions, so they can come back to Q&A later with the same spam. Even if API support were rolled out today, the Charcoal project would have to implement it, and that will take time (and volunteer time at that)

  3. Destroying users removes the posts, but not the flags. As with the weird "handled comment flag" bug, you "delete" a deleted post and the flag goes away. Completely unintuitive.

  4. The moderator flag list doesn't list Discussion flags. You have to go to a Collective first to even see there's flags to be handled. I assume this is in keeping with the "CMs will handle these" mentality, which, of course, is much harder to rely on when you cut the CM team.

    Discussion flags

Fixes we need

  1. Discussion flags need to show in their own area of the list of flags in the moderator list. This shouldn't be hard to add because (as I noted above) there's already a number to show
  2. Red flags need to be red flags that carry an auto-deletion and SpamRam/rate limit penalties. Right now, they're just a text flag.
  3. When a user is destroyed, their discussions are removed. The flags need to be removed (i.e. marked helpful) with them.
  4. Charcoal can't even consider a fix here without an API feed of Discussions. I cannot speak for the Charcoal folks about if/when they would be able to scan Discussions, but I'd like to at least see this roadblock removed.
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    1 - There is a single page for all Discussions flags at stackoverflow.com/beta/discussions/flags. This is intentionally not part of the Q&A mod dashboard. But you don't need to go into each collective to see separate lists. 2 - Underway, was planned. 3 - Underway, was a known issue. 4 - We have this in the backlog but we'll take a look at what might be possible in the near term.
    – Berthold StaffMod
    Commented Jan 8 at 21:53
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    @Berthold Thanks for the reply. I know #4 is not easy, but it also cuts off one of the best tools we have for tamping this down as well. We know spammers pay attention to Charcoal and notice what it can and can't do. Yesterday's mess was clearly an outflow of that knowledge.
    – Machavity Mod
    Commented Jan 9 at 13:36
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    I should also note that I found the flags list page you mentioned (some other mods pointed me to it as well). It is linked in that screenshot above (the "752 flags" button links there), but the UX doesn't suggest that's a link to a full list.
    – Machavity Mod
    Commented Jan 9 at 13:39
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Referencing the fixes listed in Machavity's answer:

Discussion flags show on a dedicated page, linked from the collective-specific Discussions list pages when there are flagged posts. The Discussions flags page will soon be linked (for moderators) from the main Discussions list page as well.

Red flags (spam and rude/abusive) trigger auto-deletion when a post has four of them (or one from a moderator). This went into effect last week. This data will be fed into SpamRam soon (this update is in code review now).

When a user is destroyed, their posts are deleted and flags are cleared from those posts. This is recorded as a specific type of flag resolution in the database.

We will investigate development of an API endpoint specifically for Discussions flags. As noted here, broader development of API endpoints for Discussions is deferred.

Thom A's question also mentioned rate limiting and rep requirement.

Rate limiting has been in place for about two weeks and is proving effective.

We do not have any plans to set a rep requirement for Discussions, though that remains an option for short durations if needed to stop a spam wave.

-15

Thanks, Thom A, I have multiple CMs working through the queue right now. FWIW, we know the tools for discussions are... suboptimal. Discussions is very much in an MVP status (minimum viable product), but tooling improvements are definitely on the horizon.

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    Thanks Phillipe, however, as I note on the question's comments, without putting in something to stop the content you're fighting a losing battle. Since your post there are already 6 new (not deleted) posts. You need to put a stop to that or the feature is literally broken.
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:03
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    without reasonable tooling, I wouldn't call discussions a viable product.
    – Jeanot Zubler
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:05
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    As frustrating as the situation is surrounding tooling and spam, let's try to be constructive in our comments and interactions here.
    – Henry Ecker Mod
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:20
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    @HenryEcker OK, so how do I constructively write a comment calling a company out for repeatedly ignoring feedback for a new feature where many people could see issues like this coming from miles away - especially because the company tried a similar thing (SO docs) and it failed in a similar way? The "constructive" part of this interaction IMO got left behind the moment SE decided to press ahead and ignore constructive criticism. My comment was intended to remind the company in no uncertain terms that they were warned about this scenario and could have prevented it if they had listened.
    – l4mpi
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:30
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    It’s not great that you have to dedicate CM resources to this, even if it’s only for the duration of a morning of a regular working day, when those resources are already severely constrained and unable to finish addressing other long-standing issues. Having bare minimum tooling from the get-go helps your own resource planning, as you can see.
    – blackgreen Mod
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:32
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    "Discussions is very much in an MVP status" Then it shouldn't be open to everyone. Add a rep limit, or just shut it down until proper tooling is in place.
    – gre_gor
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:50
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    It's very obvious to us and to spammers that discussions is simply not in a state to be moderated, given this I'd suggest to simply turn off discussions or at least disable posting new discussions (Whichever is simpler) until the proper tooling is in place. I don't see sense in continuing to allow adding new discussions.
    – Abdul Aziz Barkat
    Commented Jan 8 at 15:55
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    This situation was inevitable. And it is not like you haven't had a preview of what could happen around Thanksgiving when spam was sitting in discussions for days. Yes, there were only a few then, but it was only a matter of time before real spam attack would happen. And it is not like you are brand new company that never had to deal with spam before. It was obvious to everyone and their dog that having no appropriate moderation tools will lead to a disaster.
    – Dalija Prasnikar Mod
    Commented Jan 8 at 16:15
  • @l4mpi Nobody is saying you can't have a discussion about that issue. Indeed, we've had many public and private discussions about the issues with this system. What we're saying is 1. Don't be overly cynical in comments. Mods are just as frustrated with this as you are 2. This particular answer is not the place to reopen that discussion. FWIW, this issue has driven home the consequences of not having full moderation tooling. SE will either prioritize the necessary tools or eventually overwhelm the CM team. It speaks far louder than any voice on MSO can.
    – Machavity Mod
    Commented Jan 9 at 13:51
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    Just wanted to share a quick update. Our team has been working on developing a suite of tools to prevent, and more efficiently handle, spam in Discussions. In response to what happened yesterday we prioritized getting the first set of tools up and running ASAP. Those were implemented last night, and should at least slow down the rate of spam creation while we continue to work on this.
    – Sasha StaffMod
    Commented Jan 9 at 14:19
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    @Machavity acknowledged re cynicism, but IMO a post by SE which acknowledges they knew the tooling is bad and gives vague promises for fixes "on the horizon" along with insufficient measures for addressing the issue right now is certainly an appropriate place to note they were warned of this and similar issues repeatedly and shouldn't have ignored community input. I agree there's nothing to discuss as the SE management decision to press on regardless isn't really a discussable topic, but apparently lessons were not learned from history so it seems important to remind them about this again.
    – l4mpi
    Commented Jan 9 at 16:46
  • Thanks @Sasha, if you want to post that as an answer it would be ideal; perhaps detailing what (new) tools the CMs/mods have available (obviously without giving away thigns to those that would abuse it). If there are better tools and restrictions in palce, then that is an answer to the problem, and the question.
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 12 at 12:58
  • Well, based on the content (read crap) that is still being posted in Discussions, we know it's not a minimum rep limit, and not a check to see if the post is full of affiliate links...
    – Thom A
    Commented Jan 14 at 18:35

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