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ChrisHemedinger
Community Manager

First, let me say that I'm a fan of the Reddit community. I've used it to learn tricks about all types of topics, including home improvement and video game secrets. I've also answered SAS questions in some subreddits. However, over the past several months we've seen many old Reddit topics that are copy/pasted into new threads here on the SAS Community.

 

This isn't Reddit's fault and has nothing to do with the original authors of the topics. Instead, it's an approach by spammers to create what seems like a legitimate topic on the forums, get some credibility for their profile, and then follow it up with other replies that link to unrelated commercial sites.

 

The trick they use is to select some of the more provocative topics on Reddit, like "why is SAS so difficult" or "Should I learn SAS instead of Python, what do you guys think." We have no objection to authentic questions like these from community members, but we do not allow this inauthentic approach to generating engagement for misleading commercial purposes.

 

Ours is not the only community that experiences this. Many of our industry peers who manage other communities are reporting that they see the same thing on their forums. 

 

When we spot cases like these we take action. We mark the topic as Spam (to remove it from view) and then we ban the user account that posted it. How can we tell the content came from Reddit? There is a trick you can use with Google search: copy a unique phrase from the post and paste it into a Google search field in quotation marks to find the exact phrase in other internet sites.  

 

In a recent example, a thread contained the phrase "SAS seems astonishingly unintuitive and overly rigid".  A search for this exact phrase yielded a single result: a Reddit thread from 2019. That's all I needed to confirm that this was not an authentic post for our community, but an effort to leverage the popularity of our site for an unrelated purpose.

 

If you see a community post that seems  provocative like this, think twice before you respond. Many community members are quick to jump in and advocate for SAS and encourage the original poster to stick with it and learn more...but we'd hate for you to invest time in a reply that gets deleted because the topic was not genuine.

 

If you see/suspect spam topics like these, use the Report Inappropriate Content menu item on the message to let us know. We can investigate and then take action as needed.

 

As always, thank you for your advocacy and for helping fellow SAS users on the community!

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5 REPLIES 5
FreelanceReinh
Jade | Level 19

@ChrisHemedinger wrote:

it's an approach by spammers to create what seems like a legitimate topic on the forums, get some credibility for their profile, and then follow it up with other replies that link to unrelated commercial sites.

At last, I understand the rationale behind those odd postings. Thank you, @ChrisHemedinger. This also explains the temporal connection between repetitive comments on some library articles (e.g., parts 1 - 3 of this), followed up or preceded with unhelpful answers containing commercial links (in these two examples to the same site).

ChrisHemedinger
Community Manager

Thanks @FreelanceReinh ! Some still slip through and remain, but I've taken care of those you mentioned.

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PaigeMiller
Diamond | Level 26

I wonder if these spam posts are also designed to stir up discussion and controversy, to train chatbots on these alleged controversies. It is interesting to me that every post is by an "author" with 5 or 6 letters in his name, and said name is pronounceable in English, we never see a similar post by mxyzptlk.

 

Just idle speculation. Any comments?

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Paige Miller
ChrisHemedinger
Community Manager

@PaigeMiller  I think it's more mundane than that. I think it's simply a way to get spurious commercial links into other websites to boost SEO for those outfits. I also think it's ineffective at achieving that outcome, but that doesn't stop people from trying.

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PaigeMiller
Diamond | Level 26

The more I think about this, the more I like the explanation that these spam posts are trying to generate content for Chatbots to train on.


If I think back to the time when we didn't realize these posts were spam, I was very frustrated by them, as it seemed to me at the time that someone was trying to stir up controversy, which is something that a small number of people do for fun, I guess. So us citizens of the SAS communities would provide a number of answers, but the original poster never returned to the conversation. Which doesn't fit with the explanation above "it's an approach by spammers to create what seems like a legitimate topic on the forums, get some credibility for their profile, and then follow it up with other replies that link to unrelated commercial sites."

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Paige Miller

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