Spam In Rss Feeds

I don’t know much about RSS, but it seems like occasionally I get spam posts from biostar in my RSS feed and when I click on them, they’re always deleted already. Is there any way to delete them from the RSS feed immediately when they’re deleted from biostar so they never show up in the RSS feed?

I’m using the feed www.biostars.org/feeds/latest/

The issue is with the RSS reader caching the results. Right now if a post is deleted after your RSS reader connects it will stay in your RSS cache even after the post is deleted from the feed.

The amount of spam seems to be increasing – it needs to be fixed at submission level. I’ll add a both a “honeypot” form field and a simple extra validation field to the post interface. We could also add either a re-captcha (but I don’t like solving those ;-), they make me squint) or a spam classifier to proofread the posts.

But we’ll try a simpler solution first.

Biostar version 1.2.14 released. Added two levels of spam defense to the New Post page.

1. New posts need to have an extra field filled in – I am curious to see how this will be handled by bots and how soon until it is routinely defeated
2. New users (defined as within 6 hours of account creation) may only create 3 posts. This is to give us chance to ban runaway bots. An error message informs the user when the effect is triggered.

Also added a notification on how many votes a user has acquired since their last visit. This will be expanded in a next commit to show the actual posts that generated the votes.

I don’t know which of the above remediation are still in play now but SPAM in RSS is out of control to such a degree that it puts me off to skimming biostar… unless I need to get some CBD gummies or go on a Keto diet…