Community resources - what is considered as spam?

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#1

Community resources is quite a unique category compared to others on the forum, in the fact it isn’t typically about discussion / problems but more giving resources to the community therefor in my opinion making it harder to distinguish what would come under as ‘spam’.

Now as ive discussed before since PA was removed, the quality of the catagory has diminished and as a result of this ive been seeing ALOT of Anti-virus plugins and blacklist / ban / whitelist / group ban / bot ban scripts.

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My question is, when is this considered spam / duplicate posts?

The reason why i’m so stuck on this is because all the resources are technically different and may even have very minor differences in functionality. However essential they are the same resource.

So at what point, If any, are we allowed to flag these posts for spam?

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#2

Well, I never meant to spam when making Crrustban, just trying to make something for everyone else.

#3

Yes, it may not be intentional. but the reality is there are practically identical resources that already exist in the category, and unless yours is really unique I would personally consider it as spam.

#4

It is considered spam when:
You post a duplicate topic.
You post a low quality tutorial which only has code that is not very well explained. Or it’s something really simple such as a kill script.
You create hub topics, which is very low effort and you just link other’s work. This is actually against the rules now.

Those are the top three.

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#5

My question is more specifically aimed at your top point

When would it be classed as a duplicate of another resource?

#6

I think the realisation of the effort put into those sort of resources is quite low, as they are fairly easy.

#7

Well, if you recreate that resource but with more features than the original, that is spam because you could ask the original creator to add those features in instead of creating your own resource. They’re always looking for feedback and requests. Community Resources is not a competition in which the “better module or plugin” wins.

BTW, sorry if the words are off or something because I’m using a speech to text as a faster way to type on mobile.

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#8

I think we’ve already surpassed the point of these posts becoming spam. When there’s more than 70 anti-virus plugins, there’s something wrong. We shouldn’t discourage people trying to share resources, but when identical options are already available, people should not waste their time creating more of the same. Like @TheCarbyneUniverse said, you could just ask the original creator to add features instead of making your own.
Flagging these posts can’t hurt. If in your opinion a rule is being violated, you should flag the post.

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#9

Not sure what the exact ruling is, but I personally flag a a resource if it’s low quality or if there’s a previous similar resource that’s better.

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#10

I think the amount of criticism the #resources category receives, proves that opening it wasn’t the brightest idea. What if we locked topic creation to regular+ like #discussion. What makes it different from locking #discussion away. This avoids putting more work on post approval.

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#11

Spam is basically posting something that doesn’t contribute anything insightful, a complete duplicate of an existing post and just general irrelevance.

Creating a resource similar to an existing resource is not spam, it’s called preference and availability. For instance, we have Kronos and a similar plugin. Both have the same primary funcion which is to remove backdoors, but are slightly different in many ways.

You could use Kronos because it’s performance efficient, but let’s say you wanted a user friendly interface that the second plugin can offer.

Another would be cmdr and this admin panel. If you’re a sophisticated and advanced developer, you’ll surely go for cmdr, but if you’re a simple and beginner developer and love modern interfaces, you’ll surely go for the admin panel.

Making a lot of resources like these available will allow developers to learn more, at the same time giving other developers a wide range of choices.

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#12

Is there not a line though? A point in which a resource is so unoriginal / so poor that it simply cannot realistically compete with similar scripts / plugins.

This may be a bit of a weird analogy but I hope it kind of proves the point im trying to state.

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These are two shades of blue.

Now while these are different colors and could even potentially have different uses, if we are being realistic, will it really matter if we pick one or the other?

Now say I scale that up 50 times, to the same scale as the amount of ban / blacklist scripts in the resource category. They all are technically different, but they all have the same uses and the same features.

So are they not spam?

#13

I agree with your analogy and there certainly is a standard/point that a resource can be flagged for being spam due to not being insightful/original enough. In these cases, you could ask the author

There’s already x and y resources like this, what makes your z any different?

Or just flag the post as spam or flag it as something else and say that the post does not meet community standards.

Edit: forgot to address this

Well, there are some that can be considered as spam. I go through the resources category regularly, so I’ve certainly seen these posts.

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