Forum Usage

[eteam00]

For the purposes of discussion, I'll use the term spam to include both commercial and non-commercial posts which are completely and intentionally unrelated to Xilinx and FPGAs.  This includes political or social advocacy messages, and prank posts from inadequately supervised juveniles.

This evening, it seems as if 75% of the new posts have been spam posts.  For some reason, the Xilinx user forums have attracted the attention of spammers.

Spam posts don't bother new visitors who are seeking help or information.  New visitors don't spend enough time in these forums for spam to bother them.  Members who occasionally spend considerable amount of time in these forums are most likely to notice the spam posts, and then be irritated by them.  As these forums are intended primarily to aid users seeking help, and these same users are least bothered or impeded by spam posts, it stands to reason that spam posts have not been a big problem.  A 5-time-a-week sweeping of spam posts is probably suffcient, if the last year of forum history is representative of the years ahead.

If spam posts increase geometrically, though, a 'clean them up once each weekday' approach may not be energetic enough to maintain the standards Xilinx likely expects.

In other commercial technical user support forums, every new thread, every post, and reply is moderated and approved before it is publicly posted.  This is labour-intensive, but apparently the level of spam activity has prompted such round-the-clock staffing countermeasures.  Note that this moderation is not entirely preventive, as there is no moderation of changes to previously approved posts which have already been published.

If traffic (and spam traffic) in the Xilinx user forums continues to grow, I wouldn't be surprised if Xilinx adopts a policy of screening the first three or so posts of every new user.  It would be a shame to resort to such measures, but at some point the good people at Xilinx will have little choice, and will need to defend their property.

-- Bob Elkind

[gszakacs]

Spam content on these forums is certainly much lower than on boards that allow anonymous

posts.  I had thought about raising the bar for signing up for an account, but the real problem

is that the people who are in need of help are very often new to Xilinx and don't already have

a forum account.  Still, anyone with an account to download and license the ISE software should

be able to sign up easily, while it could be made harder to sign up for an account for those who

don't already have some sort of Xilinx access.

The recent pattern generally shows that someone can sign up for an account, post several

messages, and then never use the account again.  Moderating messages after signing up

would help reduce spam, but hurt those whose first post is a need for timely support.  Waiting

for a moderator would hurt the timeliness of the forum support, which is often a first pass

at solving issues while waiting for webcase help.  I suppose a compromise would be to

moderate starting from the second post with allowance for additional posts to threads

that have been replied to.  Generally no one replies to spam posts.  Maybe the people at

Lithium have other suggestions.

-- Gabor

[eteam00]

Considering how tedious the Xilinx website registration process is, I'm a bit surprised that these spammers consider the 'reward' worth the expended time and effort.

-- Bob Elkind

[rcingham]

Not that I am doubting you, but I wasn't aware that there was much spam. Perhaps this is because I seldom look at the forums except during British-time morning and afternoon. When I do spot spam I always report it, though.

EDIT:

And hardly ever at weekends...

[eteam00]

There were roughly a dozen spam postings that I noticed in a (roughly) 24-hour period, this weekend.  There may well have been more that others had noticed.

-- Bob Elkind

[chughes · Accepted solution]

This weekend was certainly unusual in the amount of spam received.

The mods have already worked to clean these up (i.e. delete the posts) and ban the users who posted.

Thanks to all of you who reported the inappropriate content. It makes our jobs easier!!

The posts that initially had genuine looking techie questions in, that people took time to respond to, but then were replaced by adverts were particularly cheeky! I feel very annoyed that these spammers have wasted the time of those willing to provide answers on our community.

We will obviously keep an eye on the amount of spam we are having to deal with and will adapt our policies/procedures as necessary! I really hope this is a 'blip', as I would much rather the time of the mods and admins in our community were spent on more useful things than deleting spam and banning its creators.

~chughes

[deanmail]

The amount of spam on the forums can probably be reduced if a general forum/current events section were introduced. This section wouldn't necessarily increase post counts, so spammers can spam here, without having high "impressive" post counts. And maybe those forums will actually provide useful information to the members at large. Members could take breaks and delve into such forums.

I don't know if it's a great idea or not, it's simply my two cents. Any response/comments would be helpful.

[chughes]

Hi deanmail,

Thanks for your suggestion.

However, I'm not sure I entirely understand it.

Is your suggestion that we should move spam into a board that we have set aside for "general information" (i.e. a board containing information not necessarily anything to do with Xilinx)?

Just so you know, our current policy is to delete spam and ban users that create it.

The spam posts we have been receiving recently have, frankly, contained a load of nonsense! They have not contained anything even vaguely connected with FPGA design.  For example, there has been political spam and also someone advertising the availability of a 'lovely' (in their opinion!) range of watches.

I don't really think that keeping this information available to Xilinx customers would be of any benefit tothem getting their designs to market quickly! :)

If I have completely misunderstood your point, I am genuinely sorry and would be very grateful if you could explain it again.

Many thanks,

~chughes

 

[naomim198]

Spam messages and contents are annoying. Sometimes it impedes the good flow of communication and learning on the web.

[bassman59]

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deanmail wrote:

The amount of spam on the forums can probably be reduced if a general forum/current events section were introduced. This section wouldn't necessarily increase post counts, so spammers can spam here, without having high "impressive" post counts. And maybe those forums will actually provide useful information to the members at large. Members could take breaks and delve into such forums.

I don't know if it's a great idea or not, it's simply my two cents. Any response/comments would be helpful.

---

There are plenty of other forums on the internet for that sort of discussion.