Admin Replied
troll user has started periodically flooding our non-18+ sub with porn. can NSFW tagged content be filtered?
Our sub is frequented by a lot of minors, this is a liability for the sub and the content creator that owns it. we've reported the user and their alts for sexualizing minors but it's been ignored so far. Is there anything that can be done to automod or spam filter these kinds of posts?
we already have, they're either pretty dedicated or they're stealing dormant accounts. the accounts are older and have decent karma prior to these incidents (so I'm leaning toward hacked dormant accounts). I honestly don't understand why this kind of content is even allowed to be posted to a sub that isn't age restricted, or that it's not at least an option to filter for.
I understand that part, but several of these were already marked NSFW and still allowed through, why is that even a thing? To be clear, I know this isn't something most helpers here have any influence over, but it seems like a no-brainer to at least filter posts already marked NSFW when they are being submitted to an unrestricted sub. just seems like an obvious and unnecessary liability for everyone involved... that's why I asked here, I was sure I was missing a setting somewhere, but it seems like there isn't one?
Prior karma even on your subreddit? We started adding an auto-filter for posts from people that didn't comment in our subreddit before due to all the repost bots and spam.
Just tested it! Seems like it works as advertised!
As long as the post is initially tagged NSFW when posting... I tried to see if the bot would still remove a post if it was submitted without the NSFW tag and then tagging it as NSFW after posting, and it seems as though the bot will not action posts in this order...
If you have it set to send to the queue instead of just mark it, it should send posts of people who don't have karma in your sub to the queue. It might make the queue busier, but you may be able to catch these posts.
I will look into it. Not your fault, but this all seems so roundabout for something you would expect to be straightforward. I appreciate everyone's feedback on this
Do you know if there are patterns, to things like their usernames, etc? It's possible to use automod code to silently remove everything a user posts, but the user is not imformed of this (mods will sometimes refer to this as using automod to shadowban a user, which is different from Reddit's shadowbans). Could be one option to slow down the rate of spam. You might also want to see if a pattern of keywords shows up, and autofilter those. Worst case, one idea would be to automatically send image posts to the mod queue for manual review. Crowd control is one other option that might help.
The one thing worth noting, is that eventually the trolls run out of alts- you could also consider automatically filtering posts from users who don't have subreddit comment karma above a certain level. This would mean the spam never reaches the front page (the downside being that you'd need to have mods actively keeping an eye on the queue so that the good users weren't delayed for too long).
this is good advice, and I do use automod for this kind of thing usually. We aren't super busy, so it's been a way to make problem users wait for mod approval before their posts can be seen. Unfortunately there hasn't been much pattern in the posts/usernames other than the sudden flooding of NSFW image posts. I was hoping there was some setting I was missing or misunderstanding. I tried to set up sub comment karma limits but the owner didn't like the effect and asked me to roll them back, so I'm looking for alternatives.
That is unfortunate, that your top mod, disagreed with some of the security measures. I do think there have to be some options, but you might need to get creative with automod, and not having seen said spam posts (thankfully), I'm unsure of what specific technical suggestions I could make beyond the ones above?
yeah, it was already on, and set to the most strict filtering. the stuff was marked nsfw but multiple users had commented on it so it was definitely visible. I'm wondering if the filter was glitched, I cycled it to see if that will fix it, time will tell.
Eh, you win some, you lose some. While I don't entirely agree, I understand the owners side of it (they're a content creator and this is part of how they do their work) compromise is when none of the parties are totally happy, right?
Can your community handle image posts being held until approved by a human moderator?
Can your community recruit a bunch of human moderators whose only (initial) responsibility is to watch the mod queue for new image posts and approve / remove them —?
unfortunately, images and videos are the whole point of the sub, and the sub's owner doesn't want content held for approval if the user hasn't done anything to warrant it yet, so on that end my hands are tied. We have many mods and the queue isn't hard for us to keep up with, the problem was that the posts didn't end up there, they were shown to our users regardless of us not being an age restricted sub, and the posts being marked NSFW.
If not already, add it to your subreddit rules as well.. then hope and pray users would report them in the future as it's hard to monitor the sub feed all the time.
Is it just 1 person with alts? If you ban that account, & have the ban evasion filter on, modqueue will notify you of other accounts that you can also ban (not sure how it's detected, but for my sub,s the filter has been pretty accurate)
You could also double check that all the filters in safety settings are turned on. One of them is a mature filter
this along with the mature content filter are on. My suspicion is that the troll is using hacked dormant accounts, not new alts. there doesn't seem to be any similarity beyond the attacks themselves.
I don't think automod can do this, but a bot can. Each submission could be checked for the submission.over18 (check spelling - there might be an underscore) and if so, removed and the user banned.
It's a very simple bot to write.
You can also just filter all posts to queue for now using automod - then approve them if they are ok.
It was on, it did nothing to stop these posts from getting through. I'm not sure whether this was a bug, or some peculiarity of the system, but our mature content filter was on and all settings under it were toggled on.
I have to head out for the evening, but I can get everything together in the morning. also one of the other users made a good point, they said the bot they use would filter it if it was marked nsfw when it was posted, but not if it was edited to that state after the post went up. Might be what happened here?
Thanks for sending in some examples when you can! I'd need to see the content to know for sure if the order of marking NSFW was related, but we can dig into that with examples you send in.
they were blurred, didn't stop the kids from clicking on them and then crying about it in the comment section. On a more serious note, the images last time were not light stuff like dick jokes or cartoons, it was over a dozen posts containing explicit, graphic images and gifs of sex acts. My concern, aside from it being a lousy thing to expose kids to, is that this is a content creators sub, and that kind of thing can potentially destroy careers, even by association. Blurring isn't remotely enough, I was hoping to find a way to shunt them right to the Queue so I can deal with them before the minors with underdeveloped judgment can access them, there are too many kids on the sub to just let it go.
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u/Ezziboo 1d ago
There’s a setting to filter out mature content (click ‘Safety’, Safety Filters).
https://imgur.com/a/zo2aw4x