This issue is to advocate some unification of instructions for d.o spam reporting, in the interests of prompting users to report spam consistently and reduce the burden on admins/maintainers.
The overall answer may be a single page providing instructions on how to report spam for each category that needs different handling, probably:
- d.o Docs article edit spam
- d.o Docs comment spam
- groups.d.o all spam?
Instructions could include:
Before reporting
- Search for a spam report for that user
When reporting:
- Put "Spam" and offending user name in the Summary field, to allow easy search
- Use Component = Spam
... and so on. Then all project or issue pages where a spam reporter might go could include a link to that spam instructions page.
In the interim, here are some problems I encountered:
"Documentation issue reports" conflicting instructions
I see three different instructions on where to report spam.
- Page drupal.org/node/24565 "Documentation issue reports" says "The documentation issues page (d.o/project/issues/documentation) is used [for] Documentation page [...] report of spam".
- Later on the same page, the instruction is to start the issue report at a different page: d.o/node/add/project-issue.
- Then in http://drupal.org/node/1471514 jhodgdon says "please report spam to the Drupal.org webmasters project".
I suspect the idea is really to report Documentation spam as follows:
- Article content spam edit: report to d.o/project/issues/documentation.
- Comment spam: report to webmasters project
Anyhow, I think d.o/node/24565 "Documentation issue reports" could be revised to prompt spam reporters to report in a maximally helpful way.
/project/documentation
Paralleling the comments above, again spam reporters could report more helpfully if page drupal.org/project/documentation spelled out where to report spam for article bodies vs comments.
/project/webmasters
This page mentions "issue tracker that you can use to report spam", but then provides no link to do so. Instead, one must read all over the page to find the very-light-font text which hints "please search before submitting a new issue". OK, search for... "spam"... which fetches a list of issues ordered by "relevance" (possibly years old). Yes, with more fiddling you can get a list in reverse-chron order, and maybe it'll occur to you to search on spammer username... but the semi daunting nature of the issue search form works to put off a reporter, or put off their searching for a duplicate.
If webmasters is the official place to report spam, then it would benefit from
-- instructions I described above (put spammer username in Summary; Component=Spam).
-- A search slot specifically for spam:
Button: [Search for spam] [Enter username]
... which would return the issue list, using Component=Spam, reverse-chron, and Search for=username
Comments
Comment #1
jhodgdonI think that actually, all spam needs to go to the Webmasters issue queue. The Docs issue queue people are not generally equipped to block users and deal with spam.
Thanks for bringing this up... I think the instructions need to be updated. Can you put in actual links to the pages that appear to contradict those instructions, and/or fix them? Thanks!
Comment #2
gwideman commentedActual links for the pages I mentioned are:
drupal.org/node/24565 "Documentation issue reports"
drupal.org/project/issues/documentation Documentation issues page
drupal.org/node/add/project-issue
drupal.org/project/documentation
drupal.org/project/webmasters
I will refrain from editing any of these, since I think someone substantially more official then me should make the definitive decision on the proper place to report spam, details about what info to include (eg: spammer name in issue summary, or whatever), and so on.
Comment #3
jhodgdonhttp://drupal.org/node/24565 -- this already said to report spam to webmasters, except in one place that was omitted so I fixed that.
http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation and http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue -- what are you advocating should be added here? I don't think we can really edit either of those pages.
http://drupal.org/project/webmasters - already says it is for reporting spam (among other things)... I don't have authority to edit that page, but you can file an issue in the Webmasters queue to make the suggestions above.
http://drupal.org/project/documentation - I just edited it to suggest reporting spam to webmasters.
Anything else we should update? I'll provisionally mark this "fixed".
Comment #4
gwideman commentedHi Jennifer,
(1) http://drupal.org/node/24565 : Although I see the added links to webmasters, the page still has conflicting instructions for non-spam:
If the intent is to NOT use /project/issues/documentation->Create, then that could be mentioned.
If the intent IS to use /node/add/project-issue, then the instructions to select "Documentation in the Project field could use revision to help the user actually find "Documentation", which is the #11,071 item in this dropdown list that contains over 11,163 items, and not get distracted by, say, "Documentation and References" (#2193), "Drupal Documentation" (#2344), or "Site Documentation" (#7491). (Is there a Drupal UX guideline for max items in a dropdown? :-) ).
If the user must contend with this dropdown, then the user needs to know that they are looking for optgroup "Drupal.org projects", which is almost at the very end of the list. (This supposes that the optgroup can actually ever be visible, which is not a sure thing given the scrolling coarseness of the control when presenting 11,000+ items.)
Once I myself eventually did find the real "Documentation" item in this list (by looking at the html source of the page), I discovered it just goes to the http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/documentation, so I'd suggest just using that link directly for Doc issues.
(2) http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation and http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue : I'm not suggesting any change there, I just included these links as you'd asks for all links I'd referenced.
(3) Now that I've seen http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/documentation, I see that it suggests to use it for reporting spam. So that's another page that could use a note pointing to webmasters.
Comment #5
gwideman commented(Forgot to re-activate the issue)
Comment #6
jhodgdonThanks for being so thorough and thoughtful!
(3) - fixed.
(1) Hopefully fixed. If you could give http://drupal.org/node/24565 a read and see if it seems clear to you, that would be great!
Comment #7
gwideman commentedJennifer:
I saw that in the Project section you added the helpful explicit links to appropriate "issue starter" pages. I thought that could be taken a step further to make the list of places to start even more immediately actionable for users, so I made some revisions in that area.
For your specific attention: I noticed that the issue form has a Title field, about which no advice is given in these instructions. However, it could well be helpful to usher users to a consistent way of using that field to precipitate better filter or search results.
So I've added "Title" with ??? to several places where advice might be appropriate. You may want to fill in something helpful there.
Comment #8
jhodgdonOK, I've edited the page. Quite a bit consolidated from your last version... and a lot of style cleanup.
I think this can be once again marked fixed.