Any idea why this repo has been getting so much spam recently?

fivethirtyeight / data

Data and code behind the articles and graphics at FiveThirtyEight

https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

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Any idea why this repo has been getting so much spam recently? #173

Closed queuebit closed 1 year ago

queuebit commented 6 years ago

Is there a way to stop it?
Is this a problem with other big repos like https://github.com/rails/rails ?
Am I just contributing to the spam by asking this question?

ascheink commented 6 years ago

I'm curious about this too. The problem started in early March, which is also when the repo was first featured on GitHub Explore, so maybe it's related to that.

I'm not sure what we can do about it, short of limiting interactions with the repository to FiveThirtyEight staff, which I'd rather not do. Maybe @benbalter has some advice about this?

benbalter commented 6 years ago

@ascheink I checked with our Platform Health team who took a closer look at the users that have been posting spam. The short answer is that it is likely the result of the repo being featured as part of Explore, as you suspected (spammers want their message to be seen so they target popular repositories).

In the near term, if you or users report the content from the dropdown, we can get the user's account disabled, and we have some additional automated means of prevention that we're currently testing and hope to be able to roll out soon which should help. In the interim, please always feel free to contact GitHub support, as you have been, if we can ever be helpful. :smile:

RZachLamberty commented 6 years ago

Could this be a result of the TalkPython 100 days of code course?

the authors reference this repo (or at least, this transcript page indicates they do, I don't have direct access) as a primary source of csv information during days 37 - 39. The course materials were first posted to github on Feb 1, which would put people taking the course linearly (Feb 1 + 37) in early March, when this started happening.