Sep
20I did a keep clean up job a few months back and deleted authors who had lots of programs on softtester. I can’t remember the figure I deleted from.
However I’ve noticed a lot of credit site listings etc again.
So I plan to limit the amount of programs an author can have on one email address.
I know that the author could then have more that one email address, but I figure since some sites require listings to be activated, its probably too much hassle for a spammer to have lots of email addresses. But I may be wrong.
At the moment I have 50 authors with over 100 programs some with a lot more than that.
I’m thinking 50 or 25 sounds about reasonable?
I guess I could limit things further and say they can only have x number of programs in a category.
I guess it depends on what type of programs an author is submitting. I try to filter out “fake” software - e.g. credit sites. The other thing I limit is screensavers and wallpaper. I don’t mind a few but one guy started submitting XXX Eagle 1 but by the time he had submitted XXX Eagle 99 I got fed up, blacklisted him and deleted his listings.
I don’t wish to sound rude but one day were you get the amount of submissions that I do, you’ll not have the time to vet them.
Therefore you’ll have to come up with an automated answer.
I guess I could put something in to email me if an author exceeds a certain number of program. However this again, will require my time to fix the solution.
i think my original idea is still good. I guess I should look at how many authors exceed 25 at the moment and how many deletions will be required.
I’m currently averaging about 80 submissions a day. I’ve been listed in RoboSoft etc. so I’m hit by a lot of automated submitters. Since starting about 5000 new PADs have been added to my database.
The admin pages on the site allow me to quickly scan URLs and anchor text so filtering is quite easy though still not foolproof.
I thought I’d give a bit of clarification as to what it is about my admin pages that makes it relatively quick to review submissions. Basically, the admin pages list all unapproved submissions and indicates which is new and which is an update of an existing program. I go through the list and assume updates are OK. This whittles down the list greatly. I usually spot the spam very easily just by going to the website URL - the list of unapproved submissions also gives a link to the submitting site. If a site is spam I then add it into a black list so all future submissions from the URL are banned and are rejected automatically on the next submission.
If I check the list every day or two, I can manage the submission process and take only about 10 minutes tops to complete the whole process
I think approving submissions is an important factor to a good shareware site, perhaps another method would be to limit the number of posts from a member or domain per day.
I was looking at the softtester site yesterday and quickly noticied quite a few spam submissions, or should i say where people have posted software (ebooks) for the sale of information.
Searching for “debt” or “money” shows lots of spam results (in my mind they are anyway).
With the size of softtester and the amount of submissions I get I can’t vet them manually. I can only programmatically make a decision.
I think imposing a limit is a good start.
I can then maybe look at adding to this.
Maybe I could score submissions, and then vet any which seem dubious.
I guess as Blue Ski Money says, I could check any with debt, money. ebook… erm…
Yes, good idea. Search for debt, diet, money, weight loss. This is what I’m doing manually - though of course the data is arranged programmatically to make this a 1 minute scan down a list of 80 or so items every day.
The blacklist feature helps a lot …