Folding Forum

I have discovered that some teams seem to have been created for the sole purpose of spam. These teams have not contributed any work units (and thus no points) and their name includes a link to in all likelihood porn. While it is bad enough that these kinds of sites are all over the 'net, it most certainly does not belong in something as respectable, mature, legit, and awesome as Folding@home. Thus I would like these to attentions so that they may be dealt with accordingly. I do not know how many teams are of this spam nature, but some of them can be found by doing a team "is like" search for "teen". In fact, I bet you could find most all of them by doing as "is like" search for "http", but I have not done this yet. It seems to me that teams that are over 50 days old and have no workunits nor points should be deleted anyway, but that's somewhat of a different issue. I'm sure the server has some internal record of when the team was founded. I would argue that all ancient blank teams should be deleted to free up space on hard drives so that that extra space could be used for holding scientific data, or other productive teams at least. Those are my thoughts, but mostly as my first post on the forum I wanted to announce the spam. Sincerely, Jesse V. from Big Lake, Alaska.

Mod Edit: Removed Team Numbers - PantherX

Welcome to the F@H Forum Jesse_V,

Thanks a lot for you vital feedback. Please note that I have informed the appropriate personal (in this case the Pande Group Member)

Exactly what I wanted to hear. Awesome.
*gets off the forums so PPD will increase*

Wow. If you do a "is like" search for "http" there are a few fine teams, and then its like row after row after row of the spam ones. So there's at least 90 teams with this issue. Good luck getting rid of them! Looks like "http" is a really good filter. I noticed that all the spam teams have a four-word name, with the last word the hyperlink, the third word is roughly the same throughout the list, and except for a few they all have no contributions. This might help you write a script or something. Best of luck. Thanks for initiating action so quickly!

Sincerely, Jesse V. from Big Lake, Alaska.

Jesse V., thanks for being a part of this great effort, and welcome to the Folding Forum.

Your neighbor, Leonardo, from Eagle River, Alaska.

Hey Leonardo! Wow small world. Well we sure know where to go to cool the CPUs down!
I may not be as productive as you, but I've got guys from Willow and Wasilla on the team that I started back in October, USU Aggies. We were just pushing 60,000 ppd, and we're almost in the top 1000! The Utah State University Aggies team is now humbled by Team Icrontic.com, but we do what we can.

Great effort indeed. Cancer took my sister, but I know I'll see her again. May this project find a solution quickly. Fold on!

We'll look to see if there is some systematic way to prune this out. The problem is that we don't have the staff to look through team names and edit them one by one. We could make a code change if there is some blacklist of disallowed sites, for example.

On the opening post, the suggestion to disallow "http" is probably a good one, though it won't catch them all.

I'm looking forward to seeing these removed. I understand that you have limited staff, and how much other work you have to do. I agree with Bruce that disallowing "http" is a good suggestion, because if any team wants to make an external link, there's a field specifically for that. I don't believe that you should have to look through all 203,000+ teams, that would take forever (unless you distributed it out ) but rather as I pointed out the spam teams are pretty distinguishable, which should help the situation. I'm just glad I can help out. Best of luck.

Not sure how 'workable' this is, and Stanford being an organisation can't use the free service offered to home users but; you could use openDNS.

openDNS allows settings filters for allowable web content ( I don't use it but afaik you can select both porn and potentially offensive sites ). If you detect an url in the name field of a new team, have a system configured to use openDNS's name servers open the url. If the url is blocked, consider the name to be unwanted.

A script running all team name's containing url's wouldn't be hard to create either.

We've made some changes which should help this a bit.

Excellent! That is good to hear.

Well it's been about four months, and I just checked again. The spam teams are still there. I understand that your staff is limited, and given what I've heard about all the server redundancies and cross-checks that it's probably a bit challenging to modify/delete a team, much less over a hundred. If total deletion is infeasible, perhaps we could simply remove their porn link or something. I'm not entirely positive how they embedded that link, but it appears on the team search but not on their team stats page. So it might be a little tricky to take care of, but their existence certainly doesn't reflect well on F@h. If they appended a link to their team name, perhaps a script could be added which scans the team/user list every week and completely removes links from the name. There will be little we can do to prevent them from putting their offensive link as their team URL, but at least it won't be as obvious. I believe that this script will have trivial negative impact to owners of legitimate teams. Let me know if there is anything I can do in any way, and I'll gladly help out.

Supportive as always,
Jesse V.

This is a very low priority in the grand scheme of things, way down on the priority list. I know this from past experience with a similar request, made while you were still in Jr. High.

And this is the internet. There is no filter, and attempting anything more than a basic filter of the easy and obvious childish attempts at humor in naming a team is a waste of time, IMO. You're certainly welcome to YO, but it won't change the priority of this request. Been there, done that, didn't change then. Not going to change much now. Sorry.

7im wrote:This is a very low priority in the grand scheme of things, way down on the priority list. I know this from past experience with a similar request, made while you were still in Jr. High.

Science comes first, I understand. I'd rather see Alzheimer's/cancer cured before this, but this certainly isn't that low. I am pleased though that you've been participating in F@h 7+ years ago. Congrats on that!

7im wrote:And this is the internet. There is no filter, and attempting anything more than a basic filter of the easy and obvious childish attempts at humor in naming a team is a waste of time, IMO. You're certainly welcome to YO, but it won't change the priority of this request. Been there, done that, didn't change then. Not going to change much now. Sorry.

Quite frankly that is a sad excuse. I simply refuse to accept it. Just because the Internet is open doesn't mean inappropriate behavior should be tolerated at a scientific endeavor. If that were the case, we wouldn't have filters on what new forum members couldn't post. Internet-wide filters have been tried before (the Great Firewall of China and the ridiculous SOPA comes to mind) but that's not what I'm requesting at all. I'm saying we need to delete/modify these teams because it poorly reflects on the PG and F@h, and that's something I'd like to take care of. As I've stated before, there will be little we can do to prevent them from putting their URL as the team URL, but their name is more obvious/public and is the main cause of my gripe. I'm a bit saddened by your "this is a waste of time" response. I have been respecting you as much as Bruce or the other Site Admins/Janitors, which is just shy of the level of the PG. I thought we were better than that, and I strive for better standards. Especially over the last several months I have put a lot of time and effort into significantly improving F@h to the best of my ability. At least I can try and put out a problem and argue for my solution. Response thus far to this thread has been favorable, indicating to me that people actually do care about taking care of this in a timely manner. As with a couple of my other threads, I will continue to reiterate this, until it gets pushed forward and addressed, or there are some strong arguments put up against it. At least I can persevere. I'm a bit saddened that it appears that you haven't been doing the same.