New Zotero people OFFENSIVE PICTURE

cberven

2011-11-03 21:10 PDT

On the Zotero homepage where it shows picture of New Zotero People there is an offensive picture containing a man's penis on a woman's face. (https://www.zotero.org/penis555)

Do we have any standards of conduct here? I've been looking for a reference management site for my research group but I really cannot recommend Zotero if this is would go on.

ajlyon

There has been an ongoing problem with spam accounts, which the admins have generally managed to delete promptly. This is the first I've heard of such offensive user pictures; I can say that they are not a problem in general, but rather a disturbing turn in the long struggle to keep spam accounts out of the system.

Hopefully the web admin will be able to implement some new anti-spam measures.

dstillman

Deleted.

adamsmith

it's been particularly bad lately - I don't see the pictures because I'm rarely on the homepage, but it feels like we've had at least one spam account posting here every day - today it's been 4 or so? Admins are fast - I've rarely seen anything up for more than 30 mins - Mr. 555 has been removed already, for example.
There are also "Report Abuse" links on every profile page.
Please do use them when you see something - it doesn't need to be offensive. Anything that's clearly a spam account should be reported, even if it's just spam for cheap software.

Given how little they actually post - it's usually max 4 posts - I wonder if those are human spammers? In that case manually deleting and banning is the only remedy there is. Any word-based filters are a) useless as they're easy to circumvent and b) may annoy regular users who study something with spam-type words (e.g. weight loss) in it.

ajlyon

I don't know the numbers, but it sure seems like spam accounts are on the rise. Perhaps we could add a new verification system?

A particularly appropriate one would be to identify a piece of a citation-- give a citation in randomly-selected citation style, and the person needs to give the author, year, journal or something. It seems unlikely spammers will build a citation parser just to crack our system-- and the input data could come from public Zotero libraries, or any large collection of citation data we might have on hand.

fbennett

Spammers do normal working hours, I guess. I only rarely see the stuff, but my viewing hours are mostly in the evening US time.

An off-the-shelf anti-idiot solution is probably best, but I'll pile on after ajlyon and suggest a disambiguation puzzle ...