6. When do you watch spam?

Adding websites and keywords to SmokeDetector’s watchlists is a big part of being a privileged user on Charcoal.

Unless a post is obvious spam, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming to detect what is a legit post and what is not. After you’ve checked a post, determined that it’s spam and found the text or website you want SmokeDetector to watch, we recommend doing a bit of research before adding it.

• Search for the URL or keyword on Stack Exchange
  • Use url:example.com in the search bar to find all questions and answers that have that website in them. Check how many hits come up and if it’s only the spam and 2-3 other posts it will typically be OK to add it.
  • Keywords can be searched just like normal text, but multiple keywords should be enclosed in quotation marks. Example: "key word" and "more words to search for". In this way it will only show results for the actual text you search for. Stack Exchange will otherwise show results for each searched word and this will typically return too many hits. You can also use code:keyword to search for text that is hidden in a code snippet.
• Search metasmoke to see if anything already exist. Maybe there’s a lot of false positives, which would mean, that it shouldn’t be added to the watchlist. Metasmoke can be a bit complicated, but it can also be the best tool to find posts reported by SmokeDetector. If you are good at regex it can be an advantage.
  • Select regex in title, body and username. Now select Use OR for text search (uses AND by default). Enclose the text or URL you want to search for with \b and remember to escape functional regex characters (. () [] etc.). You need to exclude www. from any URLs. Example: Enter \bsocket\.io\b in title, body and username. It will now search for posts that contain socket.io in either one or all of those fields. This broad search will make sure it catches posts where spammers, for instance, have added a URL to only the title or maybe even in their username.
• Check open pull requests on SmokeDetector Github. The watch you want to add might already be queued for approval. It’s always a good idea to check and make sure it’s not a duplicate.

Bookmarklets

To make life a bit easier, some users have made bookmarklets, that can do all the searching for you. Just select and mark the text you want to search for in a report from SmokeDetector and then click the bookmarklet. Depending on the version you choose to use, a new window will open in your browser and automatically do the search for you (you might need to accept popups before the window open).

A bookmarklet is just a normal browser bookmark, where you add javascript code to the URL field. This will then execute the code when you click the bookmark. Copy the javascript code and paste it into the URL field and save it, then you should be good to go.

List of bookmarklets.

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