Hi all. The Globalnews.ca feed is so festooned with spam articles that it’s a constant struggle keeping the posts out of the main feed.

I really don’t want to have bots that simply spam obnoxious stories into people’s Lemmy front pages. There’s a global blacklist for keywords like “daily deal” or “shop our”, but then I had to add a whole separate blacklist for Globalnews. Currently it is (Amazon|Prime|gifts|deals|brands|with these|skincare) and it’s constantly growing as people find new types of headline that aren’t covered by it, and report them.

Is this worth it? Should I just remove Globalnews if they can’t be a good citizen? I’m not subscribed, so it doesn’t impact me at all, but like I say, I don’t want to be spamming anyone else even if it’s not an issue for me. Let me know your thoughts if you have any.

!globalnews@rss.ponder.cat is the community in question.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catOPM
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      19 days ago

      That’s because there is an extensive blacklist which is filtering out the spam. They’re just trying to pay their bills by slipping advertisements into their story feed. I’m not mad about it but I don’t want to be posting them to Lemmy. It seems like with the blacklist in place, it’s more or less okay. I guess. No one set up any kind of bitter complaints on this post and usually people are pretty vocal about things that are a problem.

      The one you linked to isn’t a real great article but it’s not just pure spam. There was one this morning (“Here’s what to shop for at the Sephora spring sale”) that slipped through the filters, I got a couple of reports and deleted it and updated the filters.