Blacklisted for making the same post

[gparyani]

This report was filed as a result of being blacklisted for making this post (MS report). But the problem is, both reports point to the same post.

Why was a duplicate report filed for the same post, for the sole reason that they made that very post? Was it because the title of the question was edited, and it thought it was a different post because the titles were different?

[NobodyNada]

Whenever a question has any activity at all, Smokey will see it and scan it. For the most part, Smokey does not care if the post has already been reported, as Smokey does not attempt to keep a permanent record of reports (that's metasmoke's job, and Smokey does not consult metasmoke when reporting). Smokey does maintain a few report lists, but these are not intended to be complete, are not synced between instances, and in some cases are truncated to include only the latest reports.

Smokey will always report a post if it looks like spam, unless:

• The post has already been recently reported.
  • Note that only the last 15 reports are stored for this check.
  • This list is stored in memory, so it is cleared on a reboot or pull.
  • Additionally, this check requires the titles to match, which is why this specific post was re-reported. This appears to be by design, although I don't know the reason why.
• The post was marked as a false positive.
• The post is ignored.

In this case, the user had been blacklisted because the previous report was marked as spam. The activity on the question caused the post to be rescanned and be caught by the blacklisted user check, and the title change bypassed the recently-reported check.

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Does this need to be fixed? Not in my opinion. A rereport is only a minor inconvenience; it could be considered a good thing as it brings more eyes to the post. MS will never flag a post twice, so we don't have to worry about autoflagging issues. The rereport checks aren't even designed to cover every possible case; fixing this case would take development effort with little noticeable gain.

[tripleee]

status-bydesign

[gparyani]

@tripleee Can you please explain why it's intentional and by design that Smokey is supposed to report the same post twice in a row if the title is edited?

[tripleee]

I think NobodyNada's comment above is already an excellent explanation of the logic. The flag is warranted so a human can review whether it's still spam/off-topic and if not, remove the user from the blacklist by flagging the updated post as FP.

_{Sent with GitHawk}