Spam/ Fake Profiles and Users

nalight

I am new to Zotero, but as I am browsing or searching through people (looking for public libraries mostly :-)) I find that there are a lot of fake identities being used to put in key words and link to product sales pages. I searched "Kazakhstan" and "Light" and each gives a lot of these profile pages. Has this been looked at? Is it new?

adamsmith

it's not new, you can report spam using the "report abuse" link on anyone's profile page (e.g. the one that looks like this: http://www.zotero.org/nalight ), it's unfortunate but it's not a huge deal, especially since it's pointless: the library pages have "no-follow" in the header, which means the links don't help to fool google.

nalight

Pointless, but completely undermines the sense of a community. It is like graffiti in your workplace: annoying. It means that one has to decide whether this is a real person or not. And since there are hundreds if not thousands, what should be done is a complete clean of any profiles with obvious links to commercial advertising. At the minimum they could could all get warning emails and a recheck to see if they are human. It makes it impossible to search for someone with a last name like "white" or "light" because they are all advt pages.

dstillman

And since there are hundreds if not thousands, what should be done is a complete clean of any profiles with obvious links to commercial advertising.

Short of hiring people to go through every profile, there's no good way to do that. We have numerous automated anti-spam measures in place, but plenty is still going to get through.

We ban spam accounts when they're reported, but we don't ask the community to actively go through and help moderate, because it'd just be a complete waste of people's time. We'd rather people help out in other ways. Spammers aren't going to stop.

(I do think we should just remove the People section, though.)

aurimas

Idk what anti-spam measures are in place, but in terms of cleanup, it should be fairly safe to remove accounts with no hosted references and no activity for the past N months. Perhaps preceded by a warning email.

I don't particularly find the People section useful, so it doesn't really bother me that much.

nalight

Okay, well, as I said to begin with, I was hoping to find people with libraries of references they were sharing. I think it is a bit useful to have a community, but of course one could just have a way to link with Academia.edu or other social/professional networks and pages. Perhaps there are other ways to search and share what people have in libraries, but I did not find any other way since groups seem to be more than one person? Rather than eliminating the whole section, I would strongly suggest just mass deleting those with certain hopefully easy to identify features, or at least particular links. Or quarantine them somehow so they do not appear in people searches until they prove that they are active. I guess their own profile page would tell them they are quarantined and could reactivate and be public by proving they are human?? Just an idea.

aurimas

How about sorting search results by "relevance" (e.g. number of items in personal library) Looks like it may currently be sorted by creation date?

Rintze

Dan, did you ever ask Mendeley how they deal with user account spam? It seems somewhat less of a problem over there. Compare https://www.mendeley.com/search/?query=light with http://www.zotero.org/search/q/light/type/people .

fcheslack

I imagine it's mostly because they don't allow any sort of freeform input.