Why is nothing being done about multiple users creating accounts just to add fake or incorrect releases for the sole purpose of having them imported to Last.fm?

This has been an issue for at least over a year and it seems like no one is doing anything. I’ve reported many of these accounts and never heard back from the support. It’s getting really tiresome having to clean up their mess. Can’t we just keep new users from adding releases until they’re no longer beginners?

6 Likes

I assume nothing is being done so more training data can be collected for SpamBrainz?
If not, I second the above.

2 Likes

Rest assured that reports about abusive users from last.fm or other sites are being handled, especially if they are repeat offenders.

Regarding SpamBrainz as far as I know it’s only for “normal” spam and currently not being worked on. Those too need to be reported and manually blocked plus removed.

9 Likes

I don’t have strong thoughts re. blocking new users from adding releases (right now), it would obviously have big drawbacks as well as benefits.

But on the topic of the reports:

@reosarevok does an incredible job with reports - he deals with many per day, and almost always replies to the reporter. Some of them involve more complex situations, and a near endless amount of patience with new and existing users. I’ve never seen these types of reports dealt with so well, anywhere, to be honest. It’s not possible to share that work with everyone, so it’s a thankless task as well.

I won’t go into detail on your reports, because they aren’t public, but I will address “I’ve reported many of these accounts and never heard back from the support.” Is this going back a while - e.g. before reo took over the support inbox a couple of years ago? Looking at the support inbox for this year neither statement is correct. If you have unresolved reports that I’m not seeing then please get in touch with support@musicbrainz.org, because that indicates there’s a system issue and reo isn’t getting them at all.

TLDR for everyone else: Please do use the report button! :slight_smile:

12 Likes

One of the things I suggested a couple of years ago was that if three (or was it two?) autoeditors reported a user, that user’s editing privileges would be suspended temporarily until the Community Manager (or whoever was designated for reviewing user reports) could assess the situation. This would limit the damage that the user could do, and by requiring three autoeditors, that would help ensure that the issue was real (and serious enough to warrant immediate action). It was an attempt to lessen the urgency for the Community Manager to review reports immediately. I may be mistaken, but I don’t think Freso liked the idea of delegating any authority (even to duly elected autoeditors), so it never went anywhere.

4 Likes

Huh. As @aerozol mentioned, I have not received your reports, hence not acting on them. @chaban for example has reported a fair amount of the dodgy last.fm users and I keep banning them as I get notified of them (it happens quite fast usually), but sadly we don’t have a good way right now to avoid them just making a new user immediately to continue doing the same.

This is the kind of messy issue which we ideally would work with last.fm to solve, but honestly other than changing their entire system to use our data differently (or not at all) I cannot imagine what options they’d have themselves either to avoid this sort of abuse :frowning:

Edit: I did get one last night, which I’ll deal with shortly :slight_smile: But no previous ones AFAICT.

8 Likes

Apparently there are many cases of users messing with the data to fit what is scrobbled from Spotify.

Ideally last.fm would fix their crap so people don’t need to manually edit so much or even have to pay(!) for it:

Use these resources as you see fit. Maybe as an opportunity to shill Listenbrainz :stuck_out_tongue:

5 Likes

4 posts were split to a new topic: “User is banned” indicator on banned profiles?