Is there any way we, as users, can help deal with the waves of spam-meds-bots? When I get the chance I downvote, but that’s not possible for microblog. Do reporting them have any effect, or they go in the pile and are more a nuisance than a help?
If we blocked the culprit users, would it do anything other than us personally, even by just reducing their visibility?
Mostly we need Earnst (or some other kbin develop) to develop more tools to combat Spam. This is easy to ask for, but not easy to implement.
The problem I see (and what influenced the tone of my other comment) is that I don’t think I’ve seen any acknowledgement about any sort of filtering and this is a persistent problem. I get it, but also it seems really unnecessary to manually remove the 10 threads obviously not made by humans (or even just the 3 accounts that just popped up in a close time-frame).
It doesn’t need to be perfect, surely any technique can be worked-around eventually but that also introduces extra steps (that spammers don’t need to take now) that makes it harder and less likely. Doing so I think makes moderation much more viable and impactful.
Even just some sort of auto-spoiler/warning (multiple suspicious keywords in a non-relevant community, new user, 3 threads in an hour etc) could have an effect.