Spam Account Removal Idea - Removing the Burden

MusicBrainz
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As a lot of us know there are a fair few spam accounts on the platform, and although the dev team do their best to try and increase the hurdles to create such accounts - they can crop up regardless.

Spotting and reporting the accounts is easy enough, actually some could argue its relatively trivial (certainly with examples like this Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Reviews - MusicBrainz) but the problem comes down to there is one team member whos responsiblity it is to review each request (that being dear @reosarevok )

Reo does more than just review accounts all day long, and is a key member of the MB dev team so spending all their time reviewing and removing detracts them from doing engaging work! (well I assume its engaging, they can speak for themselves :wink: )

To maybe help with this burden then I thought that maybe a “comittee” could be formed of respected and trusted contributors (maybe including some MB staff) to review these reports, then cast a vote on the account.

Similar in the way that we might go through the process of removing a release or an artist entity in the database, but possibly with there being a requirement that there needs to be at least 3/4/5 unanimous votes for the account to be removed, otherwise it is left as is.

This of course would need a bit of architecting on the dev side, and fear not i’ve added it to JIRA (https://tickets.metabrainz.org/browse/MBS-13860).

Maybe see what the rest of the community (and staff!) feel about it :wink: )

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We can also search for the word “shop” in the spammer’s profile. :wink:

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A few years ago I suggested that if a minimum of 2 (or 3) autoeditors reported an account it should be (temporarily) disabled until it could be reviewed by a staff member (the Community Manager or their designate) for final disposition. My reasoning was that this could help prevent ongoing damage to the data quality by relatively quickly preventing edits by “questionable” editors. This was shot down by the Community Manager at the time (Freso) with no reason provided, which led me to believe that they saw this as a threat to their authority.

Maybe it’s time to resurrect the discussion of making more effective use of autoeditors, who are vetted and elected by the autoeditor community. Further, my guess is that the majority of edits entered are reviewed by at least one autoeditor, so the review coverage would also be improved.

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