How can I better curate against blogspam?

Question

I am a moderator of a subreddit - a sub-section of Reddit where link and text posts with a specific focus are aggregated and shared. One of my primary responsibilities is to curate the "front page" of my subreddit to make sure the content posted there is on-topic and reputable.

We frequently have problems with blogspam - very low quality content that, while on-topic, has very little substance... often reaping the majority of its content from another site. Blogspam is often posted as a means to attract ad views to the site.

In the past it wasn't much of an issue because my subreddit was small. As it has grown, the frequency of blogspam posts has increased to where it will be visible to my subreddit's readership for some time (perhaps a few hours) before I can manually get to it and remove it.

Aside from manually checking each post every now and again, can I make use of Reddit's own anti-spam functionality, or user-made tools to better curate against blogspam?

Answer 1

There is an excellent AutoModerator bot created by Deimos. This bot can handle many aspects of moderation without interaction, after the initial set up.

To combat spam, it may be useful to set up conditions that prevent new users from posting automatically.

type: submission
author:
    account_age: "< 1"
action: spam

This type of rule is very indiscriminate against new users.

Perhaps you have a problem with specific domains that end up getting posted repeatedly. You can add: domain: [youtube.com, youtu.be] above the block above to spam only those domains for new users.

Another features of AutoModerator is the ability to allow the community to police itself. If users flag a post as spam, it should be dealt with without human intervention.

reports: 5
action: remove

This rule means, if 5 people flag a message, the post is removed.

I recommend reading the Wiki on github and visiting the /r/AutoModerator subreddit for information about configuration. It is very flexible, but takes time reading the documentation.