Improving how we handle spam posts in community

[andyvan-ph]

I manually deleted dozens of spam posts in the community this morning that I discovered because Ahrefs flagged us as ranking for spammy keywords.

This flagged a few issues I think we should deal with when we can.

Problem(s)

1. Users we block using the button in Slack are prevented from posting more, but the spam they post remains live on the website unless someone manually deletes it. Afaik, all the spam was from users who were blocked.

2. The 'Delete' button on the website doesn't seem to work anymore. I tried it a couple of times, but the URLs and content remained live anyway. I ended up going into Strapi to delete them manually there.

3. Even when spam content is deleted, the URL remains "live" but is empty. We don't return a 404, so it's technically still a live URL, just with no content on it.

All the above means we're at risk of lots of spammy stuff slipping through, which puts as at non-zero risk of some kind of penalty from Google if it got big enough. We're long way from that atm, but there are simple things we could do limit the problem now.

Suggested solutions

• Blocking a user in Slack (or elsewhere) should automatically delete all their content from the community.
• Deleting questions in the community should result in the question URL returning a 404 status code, so Google knows for sure it's not a live page anymore.

[andyvan-ph]

@smallbrownbike I'd consider this important but not urgent, btw. There's no imminent danger of consequences, but we'd save ourselves some pain down the road by doing this.

[smallbrownbike]

@andyvan-ph When a thread or reply is deleted, it is removed from the site and only visible to moderators. Here's a PR to make that clearer!

Will figure something out for the 404 page. Likely a permanent redirect to /questions if that works for you?

[andyvan-ph]

Got you.

I think, for spam specifically, it would be better to return a 404, but let me check around a bit first.

My fear is redirecting lots of spam URLs might make Google think we're up to no good.