It appears that we are seeing an increase in spam across the forum once again.
I have already managed to remove several of these posts. However, I have run into a technical limitation: there is a fixed limit on how many contributions can be flagged or marked as spam per hour. Because of this, I cannot clear everything on my own as quickly as I would like.
I am reaching out to ask for your support in helping me clear the forum of this junk as soon as possible. If we work together, we can keep the community clean and focused on actual discussions.
Select the It's Spam option and then click the Flag Topic button. The post will then be marked as spam, and if there is only one post, the topic will be hidden (unlisted).
Important: The Flag Topic button only flags the first post. After that, each other post must be individually flagged as spam using the small flag icon so that the entire thread is hidden (unlisted).
Do spam posts get permanently deleted or just hidden? I’ve found that using the search function often brings loads of obvious spam posts related to Govee products.
When we flag a post as spam, it is automatically hidden from public view, but it is not technically deleted yet. This is why the original URL might still be accessible. However, posts that are hidden for more than 30 days are automatically deleted by the system. Additionally, unlisted must appear in the bottom left corner. This only happens if all posts have been marked as spam, a sufficient number of flags have been reached, or a trusted user has reported the post.
As far as I understand, only a moderator has the authority to remove a user entirely and delete all of their posts at once.
If you are still seeing spam in the search results, this is likely due to indexing lag. Discourse’s search index does not update instantly; it takes some time after a post has been hidden or deleted for the search engine to reflect these changes.
@AqaraOfficial The forum admin should take a look at this:
The suggestion to block phone numbers and email addresses would likely be helpful here and would even contribute to data protection:
One very useful regular expression is \d{3}-\d{4}|[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-]+(\.[a-z\d\-]+)*\.[a-z]+ which blocks email addresses and phone numbers. Don’t forget to enable settings - posting - “watched words regular expressions”.
Just to add: One alternative would be to block posts with unknown email domains and allow email addresses ending in @aqara.com. The approach involving phone numbers is unlikely to be very effective.
@Caroline_Zzz Could you please increase the cooldown minutes after hiding posts value? Posts that have been marked as spam are constantly being edited, which causes them to reappear (Unlisted → Listed).
It seems that, in order to hide a thread from the search results, all of its posts have to be flagged as spam. I’ve added some more information about this in my initial post.
at the very bottom
