Positive change.
Was this announced anywhere ? Here ? The 3DW Blog ?
People can’t change their behavior to services, unless changes to services are announced.
No, no announcement. The volume is still more than we keep up with. Real solution will come with upcoming changes to EW.
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One of the ones @Neil_Burkholder linked to is still full of spam from as recently as 1 day ago going back a couple of months.
https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/1001bit-tools-freeware
If nothing else can be done at least disable links. Some of the spam appears to be a legit review but has a spam link at the end.
This one from three days ago is particularly funny. Using a architectural tools to design wedding dresses. This extension must be good for everything.
‘It’ can even keep you from aging according to this review. (Feeling old already!)
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I have reported 20 comments or so now just for this extension. Only a tenth of the comments are actual comments 
. Maybe all comments should require rivewing before being published, at least on the most spammed extensions? It would require less human intervention than both having one person reporting and then another person reviewing the report. Or a neural network could be used.
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@ChrisFullmer can the emails we get when there are reviews on our extension please contain a link to mark the comment as spam, directly in the email? It would save so many clicks if you can do it directly from the email conversation, rather than open each comment separately, click report separately, write “SPAM” separately and submit separetely.
Also, when you have the time to look into it, it would be much appreciated if users and IPs could be blacklisted as spammers. To the spammer the the comments should appear to have been posted successfully (it can be seen from that account) but for everyone else it is hidden.
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New extensions (at least in preview state) contain a dead link at the top of the comments section.
The link “https://www.mollom.com/web-service-privacy-policy” goes to a Mollom content moderation service. It has been shutdown and is probably the reason for the increase of spam.
I reported spam on my Building Creator page, about a week ago. I got notice today that it was removed.
Wow, spam on EW review section is really bad. C’mon SketchUp / Trimble, please assign some resources to get this cleared up and under control.
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I’m assuming the problem is that the spammers vastly outnumber the moderators. If SketchUp’s EW could let the community moderate the comments, then that could solve the problem because the normal users outnumber the spammers. For example, SketchUp could allow extension authors to delete reviews at their discretion. The problem with that is it allows authors to delete negative reviews, so it might infringe on freedom of speech. Another option is to let users vote on reviews & if a review gets a certain amount of negative votes, then it’ll get hidden or deleted. Also, there could be an anti-spam bot to automatically delete reviews with elements of spam, such as excessive links or something. @eneroth3’s comment about blocking IP’s is good idea.
We have some better solution coming up that should allow us to better tackle the current spam issues. But we still need some time to get everything in place.
The spammers create a large number of new accounts, disposable. And they don’t use the same IPs. It would still be a wack-a-mole game - which would probably affect innocent accounts.
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FYI, we have temporarily disabled the comment section until we get a better system in place on the backend to handle it.
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