Is there a way to report/flag submissions on the File Exchange?

This isn't the first time I've run into this, but is there a way to do anything about such things other than rating/tagging? These have already been tagged as spam, but they sure look a bit shadier than benign "spam".

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/?q=profileid:22820609

[Jonas]

at least you can report the whole profile

[John D'Errico]

I've sent in a report to the FEX admin about that account.

[DGM]

I didn't think of that. I don't particularly like the lack of specificity it allows, but considering this account was probably made yesterday specifically for this garbage, I suppose there's nothing of value at risk.

[Jonas]

yes i flagged one of the questions as spam and in return that account tagged multiple answers / comments of me as spam. i already reported

[Walter Roberson]

Jonas, they flagged about 300 items as spam as part of an attack. It wasn't aimed at you specifically.

[Jonas]

i was just wondering because it seemed to be causal in relation to my own flag

[Walter Roberson]

Nah, it was automated, I could see from the time stamps (I deleted over 100 of the flags this morning)

[Star Strider]

I flagged one as spam and closed it as well. This morning there were several of my Answers that were flagged as spam, and I un-flagged all that I found.

[Siamak Mohebbi]

I consider it a Tax on creativity. Chasing individulas who expend their existance to infring on others fruits of creativity is not a worthwhile effort.

[DGM]

What?

I think I made it fairly clear that my intent was to deal with submissions, not people, when possible. I'm probably more forgiving of whatever anyone wants to post on the FEX than I think most people are around here, but I draw the line at posting what certainly appeared to be malicious code (snooping for passwords, etc).

Given that the original context for my post has since been deleted, I'm assuming this is all just a misunderstanding. If you are indeed suggesting that posting malicious code should be allowed/ignored, then you're going to have to convince whoever is in charge of making the rules.

Given that all the content here and on the FEX is voluntarily created by users, the site itself describes the sum of what has been subjectively determined to be worthwhile effort. If someone decides they're willing to make unreasonable efforts toward something of even marginal benefit, I think they should be free to do so.

[Walter Roberson]

@Siamak Mohebbi

The Usenet newsgroup, comp.soft-sys.matlab which is no ability to filter out spam, is not used much now, and has been overwhelmed by spam.

This facility, MATLAB Answers, which does have abilities to get rid of spam, is thriving.

So spending time cleaning up a community can make the difference between it dying and it thriving.

[Image Analyst]

@Siamak Mohebbi so chasing individuals (spammers) is not a worthwhile effort and is a tax on my creativity? Well true that I could spend that time more productively, but it's fairly rare, thanks to the efforts of others like me who don't want to see such posts here. So I don't spend much time on it but I think it's more productive versus, say, leaving their spam in place on our forum, for the reason Walter said. If too much spam is left in place, eventually no one would come here anymore.

[Siamak Mohebbi]

Policing the content posted is a wasteful if not an impossible task, I don’t even wish it on FaceBook.

I would suggest a possible rule of conduct to maintain standards for those who chose to comment without having a skin in the game or not ranked above a certain threshold.

Matlab support can write a simple SQL script to exclude either present or future comments from members who do not fit any filtering scheme. Follow up by a politely stated e-mail to rebuff any potential backlash.

Ps. I am even willing to write the SQL script at cost if Matlab is shorthanded.

[Walter Roberson]

@Siamak Mohebbi

This week, a spammer posted over 90000 posts; they were arriving at the rate of 200 per minute. Because the volunteers were "policing" the site, only about 15 of the posts made it into public view before the volunteers took actions that triggered the filters that hid the rest from easy public view. The posts still had to be zapped completely, though; I personally deleted over 3000 of them. Mathworks took database level actions to remove the rest.

There is no benefit to anyone in retaining those 90000 advertisements. Merely filtering them out of sight would still have involved retaining 90000 completely useless posts.

The spammers had arranged tens of thousands of identities, and were posting about 5 copies of the ads to any one identity and then switching to the next identity, so handling this on the level of the internal poster number would not have worked.

You haven't been paying attention as spammers post thousands of links to (illegally) torrented movies, or as spammers post thousands of links to "adult entertainment" sites, or to gambling sites. Spamming is big business.

[DGM]

"I would suggest a possible rule of conduct to maintain standards for those who chose to comment without having a skin in the game or not ranked above a certain threshold. "

How is that meaningfully different than the status quo? Rules already exist.

Rules already exist for everyone. Why the stipulation that rules should exist for certain user classes?

And what is the purpose of rules or a code of conduct if enforcing it is "not worthwhile"?

Are you implying that rules should exist for certain people and not for those who let crude automated content policing mechanisms run wild? I understand how fashionable that is these days, but I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who would object.

[Walter Roberson]

@Siamak Mohebbi

By the way, we are seeing a persistent pattern of "Reputation farming" by would-be spammers. They open multiple accounts and use the accounts to give the other accounts reputation points, in the hopes of getting the accounts "above a certain threshold", under the hypothesis that above some threshold or other, accounts are immune from being spam-checked, "hopefully" leaving the account able to spam without limits.

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

Not sure if you can report - maybe you can - but for us moderators you can click on the user's name twice to get to their Community Profile's page as shown in the screenshot below. Then click the Report link:

^^^^^^^^ Click Report

Someone at Mathworks (an actual live person) will look over the submission and take appropriate action.

[DGM]

Yeah. Like I mentioned to Jonas, reporting the user instead of the submission feels like a roundabout approach, though the fact that it allows for a textual description of the objection means that it can easily be specific enough for the purpose. Either way, getting human review is valuable.

Answer 2

[John D'Errico]

Best is to report them to the FEX admin. I'll do that for the ones you have shown. If you see other sustpect ones, and you just want me to forward the profile ID to the admin, feel free to tell me, and I will.

[Walter Roberson]

I reported these last night.

[Walter Roberson]

The profile has been deleted but the case is waiting for someone with fex admin privs to delete the files