Netherhero said

Why is steepster such a spam target?

So I was just wondering if anyone has any thoughts, or plain direct knowledge as to why steepster is such a target for spam. It appears to be largely from asia, is it because the tea comes from there? Or is there a particularly large number of asian users who are being targeted by these ads? It’s just perpetually odd to me that this site has more of this sort of thing than any other site I’ve been to, and I’m not sure what has made it such a target. I’m not complaining by the way, these things are hard to control.

6 Replies
AllanK said

It may be that many other sites are using things like what I believe they call capcha where you have to manually input a stream of numbers and letters before you can post. How much of the spam here is by machine I don’t know.

LuckyMe said

Good point, it should be relatively simple to implement capcha on Steepster but sadly I don’t see any development being done here. Seems like Steepster is slowly dying and the constant influx of spam puts off new users

Netherhero said

That make sense. It seems that it would benefit pretty much every tea company on here as well as steepster users to implement an anti-bot system.

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Mr Tea said

You got to think that everything is a product and if you’ve got something to sell then why not target people through chat forums

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Jason select said

Just to throw in my two cents, I don’t think we’re any more of a target than any other site that has similar levels of traffic. However, while we do have automated spam prevention measures in place and have moderators who can remove certain types of spam, in general I think we are not very good at hiding spam and the site is setup in some ways that make spam seem more prevalent (ex. the level of activity in the discussions section is not so high that it would quickly hide spam activity like might happen on other larger sites). We also have never had a chance to provide more spam fighting tools to the larger community (like being able to flag a post, tea, etc) so there are only a limited number of people who can remove spam in a timely manner, so when spam happens it’s more likely to stick around longer and be seen.

FWIW, I’ll always be around to help clean things up, I unfortunately just can’t do it as quickly and comprehensively as I would like. And it will always be on our list should we be able to support future development, but unfortunately that isn’t an option for us now.

hey, Jason, I am a tea lover based in Kunming,Yunnan. Currently i am helping an Tea company in Yunnan to promote their ancient Arbor tea, How can the company be listed on your website? or is it possible to share information in discussion section? THX

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