A macro to more easily flag spam on the forums

Macro Library
1

We've been seeing more spam here lately, and it's a bit of a pain (lots of clicks and mouse movement) to flag posts as spam.

Given I was a bit bored this Sunday morning, I wrote a spam flagging macro to ease and speed the task. Note that this macro is in an "all browsers" group of mine that includes Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and the Safari Technology Preview. If you use another browser, you'll have to either modify my group or move my macro into your browsers' macro group.

Download Macro(s): Spam Flagger.kmmacros (49 KB)

Macro screenshot

Keyboard Maestro Export
Keyboard Maestro Export1250Ă—4260 589 KB

Macro notes
  • Macros are always disabled when imported into the Keyboard Maestro Editor.
    • The user must ensure the macro is enabled.
    • The user must also ensure the macro's parent macro-group is enabled.
System information
  • macOS 14.7.1
  • Keyboard Maestro v11.0.3

How it works:

You must start by hovering over the "..." icon on the post you want to flag and invoking the macro (Control-F as defined). The macro then finds the image of the hovered dots and clicks it. Note that you might (will?) have to replace my hovered-dots image in the yellow-boxed Move and Click action with one from your own Mac.

If the image isn't found, the macro exits. If it is found, and you've left the local_secondChance variable set to TRUE, then you'll see this:

image
image1192Ă—448 70.1 KB

If you say yes, or if you've set local_secondChance to FALSE (or anything other than TRUE, actually), then the post will immediately be marked as spam.

If you try to flag an already-flagged post as spam, the macro will display a tooltip for 1.75 seconds:

image

If you trust your fingers, disable the second chance setting, and this macro will flag spam posts incredibly rapidly with just a hover and keyboard shortcut. If you want to test, I'd recommend using new posts you create in the "testing" forum :).

I haven't had a chance to use this yet on any actual spam, but it worked quite well on my test posts.

-rob.

3 Likes
2

I've never used it, but it appears from the list of built-in keyboard shortcuts that when viewing a post it can be flagged by pressing the exclamation mark (!).

2 Likes
3

OMFG. "Never mind."

Er, wait ... where would you press "!"? It doesn't work when viewing multiple posts, obviously, but how do you view just one post?

-rob.

4

I just tested on your post and the ensuing comments. While the URL does change as one moves through the comments—so each comment has a distinct link—nothing happened when I used the keyboard shortcut for flagging anything in this thread. So, yeah, if there's a keyboard shortcut for flagging a post/comment there appears to be more that's necessary for it to work.

5

Hopefully someone will enlighten us; a one-key shortcut would be awesome. Until then, I guess the macro does have a reason to exist :).

-rob.

6

I think maybe you need edit privileges like this for it to work?

image

7

Welcome to the KM Discourse, spammers.

8

I have those same privileges, so how are you using "!" to mark spam?

-rob.

9

Ah, I figured it out! You have to be using J and K to navigate the thread. Do this, and you'll see that the current message gets a highlight bar at the left. When you see the highlight bar, press the ! key.

However, with all that said…this isn't a timesaver, as all it does is pop up the same panel that appears when you click the ellipsis. I was hoping it'd just instantly mark the post as spam.

Given that, I'll keep using my macro, as I don't have to type Js and Ks, and then still use the mouse to move around the pop-up panel.

-rob.

1 Like
10

When I said "it" I meant "!". I never knew about that shortcut until @NaOH brought it up.

I have been flagging spam for ages and I've been doing it the long way so I was quite excited when I saw your macro. But @NaOH has indicated that maybe something else is required...

I'm away from my Mac so there's no way I can be definitive.

edit - you've figured it out!

11

My older OS/browser don't get the same behavior as you. When I click the ellipsis, the Flag and Bookmark buttons then appear.

And testing here, I can navigate (using Tab) and select items (using Space Bar) in the pop-up panel.

12

My bad, I forgot about that first changed line of icons; I see the same here.

Yea, but that's still a lot more typing than Control-F :).

-rob.

13

Well, at least now I know why I'm getting more flagged posts to deal with. :joy:

3 Likes
14

Hello Rob (@griffman) :wave:

Many thanks for this Macro.

I wish this existed earlier… I were able to mark the posts as spam a way lot faster.

Moved this topic from the Outback Lounge Category.

Greetings from Germany :de:

Tobias

1 Like
15

Hello Taj

No … you don’t have to be a Leader … it’s already possible for me to flag Posts …

Greetings from Germany :de:

Tobias

2 Likes
16

Yesterday (2024-12-01) there was a particularly aggressive spam attack on the Keyboard Maestro Forum, with many posts with multiple replies and even including some spam posts marked as "Solution". But since the titles and contents were kind of gibberish it was fairly easy (although tedious) to flag them. I have heard that this is a big problem for some YouTubers who are getting many comments on their sites that are semi-meaningless collections or words but just good enough to require a second look before deleting - which becomes hard when there are thousands of them - hopefully it doesn't get to this level of auto-generated spam on this Forum.