undoing something wrongly hidden as spam

Is there a way to undo a spam marker, once something's been hidden as spam?

http://www.librarything.com/work/9121059&spam=1

Got it.

Here's another:

http://www.librarything.com/work/907277&spam=1

a) How on earth could the book in 3 have been voted as spam
b) How is it that the books in 1 and 3 are visible but have retained the spam label at the top of the page. Can it be removed?

I'd be pretty upset if I saw that a book in my library had been labelled as spam so I suppose I'm coming from that POV.

v

#4 -- I'm guessing it was improperly combined with something that got marked as spam? Not sure, because I can't seem to get to the Editions page. And you can see the books because of the "&spam=1" on the end of the link -- if you go to the book page without it:
http://www.librarything.com/work/907277
you just see the screen that says it was suppressed, with the link to view it.

4b - foggidawn explains it well.

I'd be POed too if one of my books had been marked as spam. I wonder if we need some sort of "no it's not" link at the bottom, like we have for threads and reviews.

One of my works was voted as spam, and I simply wrote Tim about it. No big deal for me, and I wasn't POed at all.

If a work IS spam, either the spammer would have to ask for it back or just open another account. No big deal there either.

I think that if we give the option "no it's not" link, then we have to overcome the spammer votes in order to reach threshold (and there are a lot more of them then there are of us). I'm fine with voting and letting a spammer try to vote against it.

4: Ah yes, I understand. In that case Tim didn't do whatever it was in 2.

v

This is kind of a dumb question, but if you have a lot of books, how do you find out if one was flagged as spam? I assume you don't get a message about it. Do you just realize that a book is somehow missing?

It will still show up as normal in your catalog, listed alongside all the other books. There's no good way to know it's been deemed spam, apart from clicking on the link for the work page and realizing it's been hidden.

But isn't a book that actually exists in a legitimate users library unlikely to be voted to be spam? Isn't that why there is voting to being with, so those things won't happen?

Right. But sometimes there are mistakes.

There was a coding mistake at one point that counted undecideds as nos. I think Tim fixed it, but it's possible not everything got fixed. And it's possible sometimes people might be a little too zealous with their flagging and yessing. And it's also possible there's just a bug.

These are also not spam. They are from a legitimate user in a legitimate catalog. It looks like he cataloged a couple of websites, but just because they're websites doesn't make them spam:
http://www.librarything.com/work/5646996/book/32148908
http://www.librarything.com/work/5646976/book/32148856

PS weren't there supposed to be some checks in place to make sure something wasn't held by a legitimate user before it's suppressed?

Also not spam, also a legitimate member/catalog:
http://www.librarything.com/work/4701122/book/25537689
http://www.librarything.com/work/4701120/book/25537678
http://www.librarything.com/work/4701104/book/25537565

Bump. People are finding more and more cases like this. http://www.librarything.com/topic/89778#2049796

Can we have some kind of "un-do"/not-spam flagging procedure, please?

PS. On a related note, is there any way to implement a "search" feature for the spam works voting page? It's really hard to locate any particular vote, if one has to look through all 200+ pages to find it.

Here's one I found when testing container/contained. It was marked as spam when I saw, so I proposed a new vote and then voted no. http://www.librarything.com/work/9100448&spam=1

Maybe instead of an undo per se, there should be a not spam vote for suppressed works like the tag separation proposals.

By the way, that one (in 16) is also not on the list of 15090 closed votes. Not sure how or why it got suppressed. I think there's a bug somewhere.

Maybe instead of an undo per se, there should be a not spam vote for suppressed works like the tag separation proposals.

That sounds good.

Ok, this is weird. Yesterday I pulled down (through copy and paste) that list of all of the closed votes as of last night, 15090 votes. None of the works that have been mentioned in this thread are on that list. So somehow, things are getting suppressed without going through the voting process.

Or they are going through the voting process but the back end is suppressing everything that was proposed whether it passed or not.

20 - I actually copied and pasted the list of 15090 titles that had been proposed as spam and that had closed votes as of yesterday evening, and none of these titles were on that list.

(ETA: it's possible that what you mention is also going on; there may be more than one bug in the works.)

Hey. I'll take a look at this very soon. (ALA just finished. I'm not sure if I can do it tonight on the train, but I'll take a look soon.)

This one : http://www.librarything.com/work/6489790&spam=1 is legit too.

A gentle bump for Tim.

v

I'm working on spam right now, but starting with the upswing in profile spam, and on handling past flags.

Thanks

v

Any idea yet what's going wrong with these false positives?

Bump

Bumpety

v

Why is this book "spam"? http://www.librarything.com/work/907277&spam=1
It is a legitimate book, which happens to be hard to find (ie. ridiculously expensive online).
Summer at Buckhorn
by Anna Rose Wright.
There are only five copies listed on LT.

I hope nothing else on my LT is listed as "spam" as they are all real books, and I haven't the foggiest idea how to find out without clicking each one, which I haven't time to do. I was very surprised about the above... all I wanted to check was whether there was another cover!

Edit: Deleted it from my library, since it is still listed as "spam" incorrectly.

bump.

Thomas Jefferson has spam?
http://www.librarything.com/work/6489790&spam=1

Drinkers of the Wind by Carl R. Raswan (Ariel Books, 1942, 1961) is not spam. I'm holding a copy of it in my hand. Library of Congress assigned call # DS207.R26 1961. Please let me put it in my catalog!
http://www.librarything.com/work/edit/63124413?referpage=addbooks.php

32: Try this link to edit your copy.
http://www.librarything.com/work/7216336/edit/63124413&spam=1

The thing is, when you click to edit anywhere on it, it cannot be edited.

If you have a copy of the book in your catalog, you can edit it from the catalog (from Your Books). You'll have to fiddle a bit with the columns that you have showing, so that you can get to whatever fields you want to edit. If you don't have a copy of the book, the spam status won't affect adding it. You can go to Add Books and add a copy by plugging in the title or isbn.

Just discovered this thread so moved my post here from FAQ thread. "Songs of two Savoyards" by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan has been suppressed as spam - presumably in error? This prevents me from uploading my cover and from editing my record for it. How do I fix this? Also, how do you make the book title in a post into a link to the record for it, ie turn blue?

Hi, Eurydice2

To make your title become a link, put it in square brackets. see the instructions in grey on the right of the text box for a new post.

For bug postings, it's probably better to post the URL for the book, rather than using the touchstone (bracket) method.

ETA: Eurydice2 - I fixed your particular case by separating your copy out from the work that had been suppressed, and I'm going to combine it with other non-suppressed copies. So you should be good to go.

Eurydice2, you may be able to get your edit page etc to work by putting &spam=1 at the end of the URL you want to see. Right click on the link you want to see (but don't go to it), and then copy the URL (copy shortcut or copy link location) and paste it in the address bar, then put &spam=1 at the end of it, then hit enter. It's a clunky work around, and you'll have to do it for every section of the workpage you want to see, but it might help.

You can also edit most book details from within the catalog, by just double-clicking on the appropriate cell.

Thanks staffordcastle - don't know how I missed that. and thanks rsterling, I am now able to upload the cover, although it seems now as though only one person has the book, and it isn't me, and I don't get a green tick for this book in my list of works for W. S. Gilbert. Am I correct in assuming that once a work is suppressed, correctly or otherwise, there is no way to reverse it other than workarounds?

One source of false flaggings might be the black hole work. It seems to be spam-flagged in its current incarnation http://www.librarything.com/work/10383911&spam=1 , and thus, all the individuals caught in it will be flagged as well. In this case, editing the afflicted work to have good author, title, and preferably ISBN, should work.

It was still misbehaving. I think it is OK now - but I had to separate and recombine twice before the combined work showed all the members.

More works uncorrectly marked as spam:

http://www.librarything.com/work/9578255&spam=1
http://www.librarything.com/work/9578258&spam=1
http://www.librarything.com/work/2445236&spam=1
http://www.librarything.com/work/2445255&spam=1
http://www.librarything.com/work/2445269&spam=1

Songs of two savoyards has got suppressed again after less than a week! Anyway, I see that there are other copies of it under Sullivan alone and also under Gilbert & Sullivan. Would it cure the suppression problem for this work if someone unsuppressed and combined my version with one (or both) of these, or would that just spread the problem? Either way, all those copies should be combined, and I can't do it because of the suppression.

43>

Nobody *can* unsuppress spam -- the threshold for the process the way it's supposed to work is high. Tim probably could, but doesn't seem concerned either with finding the bug that leads to random works being suppressed without going through the usual proposal-and-vote process, or with un-flagging those that have been wrongly marked. (At least, he's never commented on it here, if he is.)

Thanks Lorax, So if I change the author on my copy, and try to combine this record (has 3 copies) with http://www.librarything.com/work/3203153 where the author is Gilbert & Sullivan. Would that just leave the suppression behind? Or maybe as it's suppressed, that can't be done? I'm tempted just to separate out my own copy and combine it with the Gilbert & Sullivan version, but that would leave the other two copies in limbo.

Nobody answered :( So I selfishly solved my own problem by deleting the title from my collection and adding it again under the covenient and apparently legitimate author Gilbert & Sullivan, cunningly combined in all the versions that were under Sir Arthur Sullivan or had no author, so now there are 4 copies of it combined. This leaves in limbo the two copies remaining under http://www.librarything.com/work/10384282&spam=1
if anyone can fix that.

I suspect that someone recombined the copies I had separated out with the one marked as spam. I'll try to separate these out again and leave a disambiguation notice this time.

ETA: Done. I also combined those two strays listed under W.S. Gilbert with the copies listed under Gilbert and Sullivan, since I'm assuming these are all the same work. With vagaries of author pages, it's a toss-up now which author page the work will show up on, but with luck this might solve the marked-as-spam problem and also get all copies of the work combined properly into one work.

The problem is that the spam version is arguably the legitimate one, as the statement of responsibility in my copy says "by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan" not Gilbert & Sullivan, so other copies will innocently be added to the spam version if it remains

49 - That may be right. The copies that were there were added some time ago, so it's hard to know. It's also possible they'll go with the other two legitimate copies (the strays that are now combined in with the Gilbert & Sullivan work).

Thanks r, At least they're all together now, but I hope LT is working on that spam problem. When you look at the editions of Songs... it invites you to combine the spam version in. As it's no longer a best seller the problem hopefully can't escalate too fast :)

A zero-member copy of "The Mystery Of Edwin Drood And Master Humphrey's Clock" attributed to Charles (surname Dickens missing) has been marked as spam: http://www.librarything.com/work/5996144/editions&spam=1

This work from my library has also been suppressed as spam http://www.librarything.com/work/9435802&spam=1

Another work that is definitely legit but that has somehow acquired the spam label:
http://www.librarything.com/work/6218932&spam=1

53> It's here twice: http://www.librarything.com/work/10521265

I don;t want to combine it and mess something up and make it worse. The authors for those need to be combined as well:

http://www.librarything.com/author/benjaminr
http://www.librarything.com/author/benjaminralph

Yes; I separated the spam-labeled thing so that the two legit ones may live. And like you, I'm afraid of touching it any more.

How are these books getting marked as spam? Should this be something added to the new bug tracking system?

56. It has already been reported. No response, either this time or in the previous times it's been reported.
http://www.librarything.com/topic/99404

I use LibraryThing to list my DVD's as well as books. One of the films in my library has marked as spam:

http://www.librarything.com/work/5241223&spam=1

Aagh. I separated http://www.librarything.com/work/10521265 out from an earlier copy of the work that had been labeled as spam. No new recombinations have taken place, either on the work or on the author, but now the previously unspammy editions are slandered, libeled, and labeled. It is a contagion!

Why is this book (in my collection) listed as spam? I can't even upload the cover, or see the related conversation:
http://www.librarything.com/work/907277&spam=1

60 - as a work-around, put &spam=1 at the end of the URL you want to see/work on.

A classic of dramatized Finnish history that is not never nohow spam
http://www.librarything.com/work/2849972&spam=1

A work in my collection has been labeled 'spam' www.librarything.com/work/8071391&spam=1
this item is in WorldCat, OCLC#15985433, and owned by several libraries inculding Indiana University, Library of Michigan, K. State Libraries, Detroit Public Library, University of California Santa Barbara. In what way is it spam?
The First Battle of Bull Run: an eyewitness account by Harry Drake. I went in to add information, and am unable to work with the record.

63 It's a bug; a longstanding one that needs to get fixed. You can get some access to the work pages, to edit your book, by putting &spam=1 at the end of each page you want to see.. Or you can edit your books from within the catalog, using the columns.

This work by Willy Kyrklund is not spam. It's a minor classic!
http://www.librarything.com/work/book/67493126

65>

Nobody is calling it spam. You don't need to justify the book or get defensive. It's a software bug, not overzealous spam flaggers.

More not-spam flagged as spam. I alerted Tim & co about these 4 months back; still no response:

http://www.librarything.com/work/9578255
http://www.librarything.com/work/9578258
http://www.librarything.com/work/2445236
http://www.librarything.com/work/2445255
http://www.librarything.com/work/2445269

Check out: http://www.librarything.com/topic/99404

(Staff seems aware of the problem and trying to fix it.)

One that needs to be voted on:
http://www.librarything.com/work/3679304&spam=1

Please vote against this one:

http://www.librarything.com/work/4171435&spam=1

This work was marked as spam:

http://www.librarything.com/work/5801095

I don't think that's correct. The user is legit (although many of their works are single copies which has to be matched up with the correct records) although the title does not appear on line. I voted to have the spam label removed and it's now gone. Kind of surprised to see that happen with just a single vote. Can folks check on it please?

This was one of those titles that had votes on both sides when it was voted on to be spam.

I voted to have the spam label removed and it's now gone. Kind of surprised to see that happen with just a single vote.

Tim's assumption, when he introduced counterflagging for this, was that spammers are rarely willing to pay for their accounts. So he made it so that a counterflag by a paid member is enough.

And I agree that one probably is a ligitimate work. It's simply that this user is interested in (internet) marketing and such. To each his/her own.

That makes sense and now that I think about it, I seem to recall that.

Thanks

How can we please undo a spam flag on The Wardens of Punyu which was just a typing error? We voted immediately no but this was a really bad accident.
EyesandEarsEditions

>74 EyesandEarsEditions: There were enough NO votes and the spam flag has already disappeared.

Many thanks, Taphophile 13,
Best wishes,

I check in the Spam talk folder once in a while. Just now, I rescued this thread

https://www.librarything.com/topic/290829

That's the second French language post I've pulled from there.

Here's the other: https://www.librarything.com/topic/289281

Is it possible the Spam algorithm is language prejudiced?

Yes, I've rescued a couple in French as well.

Again with the French language being falsely identified as Spam.

Just pulled three post out of the Spam folder:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/300132
http://www.librarything.com/topic/300131
http://www.librarything.com/topic/300126

Admittedly, first posts by new members, but...hey!

>80 2wonderY: May want to make sure the group didn't get snagged in the flags too.
Looks like a French school or something, that's had a few new groups created by members.

I'm not sure why this profile was removed: http://www.librarything.com/profile/KMTR

His or her posts seem perfectly legit: http://www.librarything.com/topic/300098 Just looking for a book, and then finding it.

>82 lilithcat: I wonder if he or she removed the profile, if they'd only joined to get help in finding the book.

Lifetime member joined in 2014 and he posted in Korean Geeks group just now, and it ended in the Spam folder. I rescued it, but what's the solution? Will any Korean language post be suspect? Didn't used to be...

http://www.librarything.com/topic/302061

>84 2wonderY:
Well, there have been several large spates of spam using what looks to me like Korean text. Depending on how many Korean-language threads are legit, it might simply have been a case of a blanket assumption of spam.

No idea if that's what's really happening, but just spitballing.

And here, a new German member's first post was in the Spam folder:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/312526

Established member and founder of the group it was posted in

http://www.librarything.com/topic/320367

salvaged from the Spam? folder.

I’m confused. I rescued a post from the Spam folder and checked that it does now appear in Ancient History group. It’s there, but it also still appears in the Spam folder. Can someone else check; it might need a bug report?

>88 2wonderY: It was in the spam folder when I checked, but disappeared when I clicked the lifesaver icon.

Thank you. I must have lost my special touch.

Anthony Trollope is not spam!

Please vote no.

https://www.librarything.com/work/10321983&spam=1

Please take a look at my post on Is This Spam? #14. I believe I'm being targeted by a certain member who dislikes me, and I don't think my post in question counts as spam.

>92 SDaisy: Do you mean https://www.librarything.com/topic/322975#7593904? It was flagged because personal attacks are a TOS violation. Go to https://www.librarything.com/privacy and read the Community Rules section to understand why that post was flagged.

>93 amanda4242: I corrected that post, I was just angry at the unfairness. The post I believe was unfairly flagged was the one being talked about before I posted. I would like to know what rule it breaks, please. I can't find anything in the rules that say I can't talk about my friend's book and say he has review copies. I get no personal gain from it.

>94 SDaisy:

The fact that you don't get "personal gain" is not the only criterion for determining whether something is considered spam. It is still advertising.

How Authors Can Use LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/about/authors says: "Do not post messages in Talk advertising your book" , and refers authors to Hobnob with Authors.

Please don't say, "It's not my book! It's my friend's!" because the effect is the same. You are advertising a book and asking for reviews. If your friend wants reviews, he can offer his book through his publisher in the Early Reviewer program, or, if it's self-published he can offer it in the Member Giveaway program.

This work has been preliminarily suppressed as a result of spam activity by the member who added it. Members can examine it here.

Really weird that some of my books are suppressed while suggesting that I conduct spam. I guess some members have nothing better to do.

>96 edwinbcn: If you post links to the books in question, we can see what happened and potentially reverse the incorrect flagging.

>96 edwinbcn: That message does not mean that a member has marked your books as spam, it means that the system has determined they might be spam for some other reason. Something weird going on.

Ok I've rescued a large batch. It only takes one vote to reverse the spam designation since they were only marked as "potential spam" and not actual spam.

>96 edwinbcn: I notice that most of the books in your catalog marked as potential spam were added more than 10 years ago so hopefully this is not something that will continue

>97 gilroy: If you go to the user's catalog and sort by total members, all of the "potential spam" works will be listed as having 0 members

It's down to under 100 now.

I think we've done it.