[request] a feature for admins to mark spam questions for automated removal

[RaiMan]

Looking at the question section of Launchpad it is obvious, that spamming happens rather often.

The currently recommended action, to report spam here and leave it to the Launchpad admins to do the job, helps in most cases, but can only be an interim solution.

For me as region admin it would be easier to simply set the question to invalid, so it is out of normal scope. But this would not be helpful for the community.

So my conclusion:
Add "spam" as additional status type. It should work like "invalid", but would be an additional token, that would allow to asynchronously work with the spam and optimize filters or any other banning actions.

[RaiMan (raimund-hocke)]

The bug 45419 is somewhat historical ;-) and talks much about the launchpad internal procedures.

So I put my request as a new bug now and I do not think it is a duplicate of bug 45419 though it is surely related:
my request is simply about an additional question status "spam", that in the GUI is handled the same as "invalid".

I think this serves both sides:
- the project admin has a shortcut to get spam questions out of the way, without deleting the information
- in the background whoever/whatever can additionally do, what makes sense

I did not come over spam as bug reports until now (guess it is because of the 2-step procedure), but the solution would work there as well.

A similar solution would be possible for comments like the hide feature: a spam button (only available for project admins) would hide the comment and then could be handled by some background task.

I am not familiar with the launchpad system as such, but at least the frontend features should be rather easy to implement.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Thank you for your suggestion. I agree that we need a better way for project admins to get things out of the way (opening questions isn't a great interface, and the way that some people reply to the spam with "please close as spam" is arguably even worse). Still, I would very much rather not further overload the status field for this. In my opinion it would be better to have a separate "flagged as inappropriate" column on the various relevant tables that could go into a queue for processing, and would have separate presentation in the UI. (That is in fact pretty much what bug 45419 says, although as it happens my internet connection was down while I was writing the first part of this comment and so I arrived at the same conclusion independently.)

However, (a) development time is extremely limited, and (b) we need to work out what the queue processing side would look like before implementing anything here - otherwise we risk just adding another field that ends up being cruft nobody looks at.

Please don't open new bugs just because you've decided that the existing ones are "historical". Again, doing that kind of thing in an attempt to get our attention only makes our backlog worse. Bug 45419 seems like a perfectly good description of what needs to be done, and so I'm marking this as a duplicate.

[RaiMan (raimund-hocke)]

@Colin
thanks for the clarification.
At the time, I looked into the related bug my comment #1 reflected the content at that time.

To be honest:
Since my project is about visual automation, I have no problem, to setup a few lines, that I trigger, to get rid of a spam question.

Why I currently report about spam questions is only, to support the system to get better. I do not have a problem, if the needed effort cannot be spent at the moment.

But if this is so, then I would like to know about that within some acceptable time of max a few days. If I would not have posted this "WHY NO REACTION ..." question .... ????

No need to answer - I am satisfied at the moment. Thank you.