I just got a "Stop spamming us, you're wasting your time" message when submitting a genuine link which was the new video from RSA. "the paradox of choice".
I've never spammed this site, at least not knowingly. Please help?
This happens when you submit a link to a spam site. When it happens to innocent people it's usually because some site has been mistakenly classified as a spam site, e.g. by an admin fat-fingering something on an iPhone.
I investigated further and that is in fact what happened. Youtube.com mistakenly got marked as a spam site. I unmarked it, so you can submit your video now. Sorry about that.
The other problem I've encountered on mobile devices (and even occasionally on a PC with a mouse) is that the voting arrows are small and quite close together, making it rather easy to hit the wrong one.
One possible solution would be to have only the arrow you click disappear, so you could always hit the other one and at least cancel out your own vote if you made a mistake.
You think? On my iPhone, the page width is about twice as wide as would be comfortable to read, so either you read tiny print or zoom and scroll constantly.
I hate doing this. I just want to see the comments for an interesting article and end up flagging it. I always hammer on the back button, but doubt it does any good.
I don't know if a single user flagging a post on accident has any real effect, but it makes me feel terrible.
An alternative to a mobile skin might be to have the option to "unflag" something. Even with a mobile skin, I could see submissions still being accidentally flagged.
I also got that the other day when submitting something via the bookmarklet. When I opened the "submit" page and copied things into the boxes (copy/paste) then it all worked.
Not sure what is being triggered, but it looks like more than one false positive for "spam" detection.
EDIT: As an experiment I've just tried to submit using the bookmarklet the RSA Animate of the talk and got the message again ... then I tried "by hand". Both times I got the "Stop spamming us" message.
I wonder if it's the direct link to the YouTube video that's the problem ...
Now I've succeeded with a link to a different site.
PG: You have an interesting glitch in your spam detection.
I just used the search function to look for HN submissions that contained the same keywords in the title, and noticed there are previous submissions that do. Even though its a different link and different content. I wonder if that's causing the glitch?
maybe some bayesian learning algorithm disseminates the url you submitted and calculates a spam possibility based on the tokens (then the token 'youtube' might have a high bias for spam).
just a thought though, that I got after reading http://paulgraham.com/spam.html
Well shoot. I didn't get a "stop spamming" message.
For what it's worth, the video is called "The Kepler Orrery" and it's an animation showing all the multi-planet systems discovered by the Kepler mission so far, side by side, with the same length and time scale. It's pretty awesome.
As an experiment (and I wouldn't normally advocate this) try submitting it again, see if you get the message this time.
EDIT: Actually, having gone and found it, don't. It doesn't really contain any seinsible information that I can see - it just appears to be a lot of spinning circles, some music, and no real information about what you're actually looking at. It might be great, but it's impossible for me to see why.
