Yeah, I was just suggesting improving the stats only if needed because we are unable to understand if this is a problem.
A bit of chicken-egg issue, so maybe it’s possible to get a more realistic estimation of the problem using other existing tools/observations, so people can decide if it’s worth investing time into helping to better solve the problem.
What are other people’s experiences observation of the spam content/accounts?
Which feed is that? My recollection is that this problem was addressed at https://blogs.openstreetmap.org/ so that the diaries were re-read to remove spam.
I actually disagree with the original premise that “OSM diaries see a lot of spam” - I hide maybe 1 or 2 a day on average, which in the great scheme of things is not that many, and they don’t stick around for long. Other people are doing this in parallel of course, but perhaps @mvexel could explain in a bit more detail about the problem (specifically how many, what time of day, and what constitutes spam)?
https://blogs.openstreetmap.org/atom.xml
The problem does indeed seem to be fixed for blogs.osm.org, which is a good thing! What I referred to is that an RSS/Atom client application (Thunderbird in my case) commonly doesn’t delete posts just because they are missing in the latest update of the feed. This is probably done this way to avoid losing old posts which have “scrolled out” of the feed. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism to distinguish posts which have been deleted from those which are simply no longer included. So I don’t think there’s any easy solution except the obvious observation that deleting spam faster is better.
When browsing through the list of diary posts on Users' Diaries | OpenStreetMap, you’ll notice that each diary post has an increasing unique id number at the end (e.g. 400085 in mvexel's Diary | Specialized mappers | OpenStreetMap).
Would it be a fair assumption, that any gaps in those numbers in the list of “Users’ Diaries” would be mainly spam posts, such as 400073?
Users can’t hide diary posts on their own, so a moderator or administrator must have taken some action here.
Are you sure? I’d have thought that a user deleting their own account would do that.
Yes, you’re right, but that would hide all of them at once.
Thanks for taking care of spam for all of us!
I was merely offering my help. I know the folks behind the scenes are dealing with a lot of requests and incoming signals. I didn’t realize diary moderation was done by the Data Working Group as well. My offer stands!