Dave’s Answer:
It wouldn’t be Internet, it wouldn’t be social media, if there weren’t trolls, cranky folk and spammers floating around in the pool too, so unfortunately it’s a fact of life, even in the new universe of Google Plus. I don’t know how they creep in, actually, but as soon as millions of users showed up, well, then the people that hide under rocks appeared too.
Fortunately the Google Plus team knows that there are going to be spammy and inappropriate comments left, and that there are also going to be comments people leave that you’ll want to delete but won’t want to necessarily report as abusive or spammy. Two different scenarios, right?
The problem is that the controls to edit your comment stream appear in one area but not another, and they’re hidden unless you know where to look for them.
Let’s dig in…
I posted a question to Google Plus about trips and weather, and the first [planted, Scott's not normally this abusive, just so you know] comment is rather troublesome:

The problem is that while this mini-window is great if you’re in Gmail or otherwise using a different Google tool, you can’t make any changes to the comment stream. What you can do as a handy shortcut, though, is scroll to the bottom of the mini-window:

Click on “View all mentions of my name” and you’ll see the same post and comments, but in the main Window rather than just the mini-window:

Now things get interesting because if you move the cursor to the lower right side of the comment you don’t like, some additional icons magically appear:

The flag icon lets you report a comment as abusive:

Once you’ve done that — if appropriate — then you can remove the comment from the discussion entirely (needless to say, they’re two different things, to match the two scenarios mentioned earlier) by clicking on the “X” icon:

Click on the “X” and you’ll be asked to confirm that’s what you want to do:

Really want to delete it? Then click on “Delete”. It won’t notify the author that it’s been deleted, but if they go back and review the discussion, they’re obviously going to know that their comment has mysteriously vanished.
Finally, the feedback that Google+ shows you:

Once it’s “crossed out” then you can be sure that the comment won’t appear for anyone else and, if you reload the discussion, it’ll vanish for you too.
Hope that helps you manage the discussion and mark as abusive all those annoying spammers!

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Dave’s Answer:

I’m a Google Plus old timer, I’ve been on it for weeks now. It’s only been in the last week that I have started to see irrelevant, rude or spammy comments showing up on my notes, and only those that I share with “Public”: One way to avoid spam comments in the first place is to only circle up people you know or trust, then only sharing your notes and discussions with them, of course.

If you do want to toss your ideas into the swirling maelstrom of “Public”, however, you’re inevitably going to see these spammy comments appear, though hopefully we won’t be overrun with them before Google figures out a smarter top-level filtering system.

I recently posted a note on Google Plus myself and when someone with the name “Sunil Gupta” decided it was the perfect place to advertise his affiliate link for some service or other, I actually posted a note saying “I wish I could remove individual comments”. My friend Kee Hinkley set me straight (thanks, Kee!) and that’s where this post comes from.

First off, here’s the note I posted:

Fairly innocuous, certainly no reason for a spammer to add a comment pointing to their service or similar. And yet, not 20 minutes passed before this appeared:

At first I thought perhaps it was a third party site that was tracking G+ feature requests, but I clicked on the link, saw it was some affiliate related ebiz site that I have zero interest in, and realized it was spam, not actually something helpful to the discussion that was already going on.

But how to delete it or mark it as spam? As with Facebook, Google Plus has already trained me to move my cursor to the top right of the “box” that contains the element, but here no little menu magically appeared. Hmmm…

Turns out the trick is to go back to the original note in the discussion and click on the small grey triangle on the top right. A menu appears:

As you would expect, “Report or remove comments” is what we want to deal with the spammy comment from Sunil, and now two links appear adjacent to each comment in the discussion:

The “X” removes the comment, but before I do that, I want to ensure I mark it as spam so that — I hope! — if there are enough spam comments from a G+ account, the account will be shut down. To do that, I click on the flag…

Now I can safely delete the comment if desired, or leave it in the discussion thread, having marked it as spam. It’s up to Google what happens to Sunil’s account now. I kinda hope he’d get an email encouraging him to contribute to discussions rather than just spam them, but as of this early date, I have no idea how the G+ team is processing spam flaggings.

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I too run some groups on Facebook — including The Ask Dave Taylor fan club, which you are a fan of, right? — and know exactly what you mean. If it’s a well-meaning but misplaced posting then I usually just delete it without any sort of penalty or block, but if it’s someone who posts stuff in the group that’s just annoying, inappropriate, of an overly political nature, or just plain rude, then I do consider blocking them.

Your timing is good because just a few days ago I had a situation of this nature arise in the ADT Fan Club and captured the sequence I took to not only remove the posting from the group wall, but also block this participant and report them as a spammer to Facebook itself. Now, what Facebook does with these reports I don’t know, but I certainly think that reporting them is always better than not reporting them…

Anyway, there I was checking my group and I saw the following posting:

Suhaimi might be a lovely chap, but this kind of posting is wayyy off the mark in my Facebook group and, frankly, given that I write about how to do stuff like this, a doubly dumb move because now he’s forever marked as a spammer here on my blog. Ooops!

To just delete the post, I can move my cursor to the top right of the invisible box that his posting’s within, at which point an “X” magically shows up. Click on it and here are my basic options:

Instead of just “Remove Post”, however, I’m going to “Report as Abuse”, which produces the following explanatory window:

Note that one option is related to bullying or rude comments about you that might appear. If you have kids, this is a good one to tell them about, because Facebook does take online bullying (aka “cyberbulling”) seriously. Still, that’s not what we want. We just want to mark this as “Spam or scam” and click “Continue”…

At this point I can opt to send a message to Suhaimi but with a posting like this, I’m not going to impact his strategy of spamming Facebook groups, so instead I opt to block him from the group and report him to Facebook. Here’s what those look like:

One more click of the “Continue” button and it’s a fait accompli:

Note that as the group manager you should definitely set things up so that Facebook emails you copies of whatever’s posted to your Facebook group by going to “Edit Page” (top right button on your group’s home page) and looking at the settings under “Your Settings”.

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Dave’s Answer:

I hate spam too, but perhaps not quite as passionately as you do, if I may say so. I figure it’s an inevitable side-effect of the Internet itself: it sure seems easy to make money, and the economies of scale are all messed up (where it costs as much to send a million untargeted messages as a dozen perfectly targeted ones), so we suffer through stupid pitches, lame product offerings, scammers and spammers.

Not that I like it, and not that I wouldn’t be secretly in support of that death penalty for the most outrageous offenders, particularly when you take into account the hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted IT efforts and thousands of hours of time spent combating the problem. Heck, I pay over $100/yr for a commercial anti-spam solution to help tame my wild mailbox.

It’s also ridiculous that the default setting in Yahoo Groups allows people to not only invite you to join their groups withint permission, but to actually add you to their new groups without your advance permission, letting you instead opt out after the fact. Stinks.

Fortunately you can turn it off.

Let’s start at the beginning, though. Here’s a typical message I was getting from a spammer tied to a Yahoo group:

Check especially the description of the group. Can’t Yahoo just automatically trash these, since it’s obvious that the lack of dictionary words in either the name or description are highly suspicious, to say the least…

Scroll down to the bottom of the message, though, don’t just delete it:

There’s the link you want: “Change your email preferences”. Click on that scary complex URL and you’ll find that there are some darn important email preferences in Yahoo Groups to adjust:

My suggestion is to uncheck both of these, then click on “Save Changes”.

Oddly, this then takes you to another screen with the same exact set of options. As far as I can tell, you need to choose these yet again and save them yet again:

Wait a sec, though. I had to log in after all this to prove I had proper access to my account:

Finally, I am reminded that Yahoo Groups knows three addresses for me, and so I dutifully turn off these options for all three addresses:

Really, Yahoo, there’s got to be a better, easier, faster way to do this…

But now you know. Go forth, change those preferences, and you should at least be able to control this small bit of your spam tsunami.

Dave’s Answer:

Before I do any research and show you how to figure this sort of thing out yourself, let me say off the bat that yeah, it’s probably a phishing scam indeed, email that wants you to go to a domain that has “paypal” in its name and purports to be part of the Paypal organization, but isn’t actually Paypal.com.

Still, I’m really skeptical, so perhaps it’s just me…

The first thing to check with a potential phishing attempt message is who owns the domain name. You can go to a ton of places to do a domain registration check, but I prefer the original service that’s been around forever: Network Solutions.

You can go directly to a WHOIS Lookup on Network Solutions.

The form looks like this:

Search for “paypal-labs.com” and you’ll find…

Registrant:
        Host Master
        PayPal Inc.
        2211 North First Street
        San Jose CA 95131 US
        hostmaster@ebay.com +1.4083767400 Fax: 

Well that’s a surprise. Turns it that the domain is owned by Paypal.

Not sure? Look up Paypal’s main domain — paypal.com — and you’ll see it too is registered to a company headquartered at 2211 North First Street. Still paranoid? Search that street address in Google Maps and you’ll see:

So this time it’s not a phishing attempt, but I often wonder about companies that send out email to customers from alternative domains, especially when informing their customers not to click on URLs in email messages anyway.

Next time you get an email of this nature that you’re suspicious about, do pop onto the Network Solutions siste and check out their WHOIS service.

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Dave’s Answer:

It’s a phishing attempt. I get these every so often too. The most recent reads like this:

This message was sent automatically by a program on Webmail which periodically checks the size of inboxes, where new messages are received.

Your mailbox has exceeded the storage limit set by your administrator. You may not be able to send or receive new mail until your mailbox size is increased by your system administrator.

To help us re-set your SPACE on our database prior to maintain your INBOX,you must contact your system administrator by replying this e-mail and enter your: Current Username: { } and Password: { } to increase your storage limit.

Let me say that again, in bold:

Any email that asks for a password is bogus. Just delete it!

If you think about it, no real administrator would ever need your password: if they are the admin for the system, they have the ability to access your account and make any necessary changes or updates anyway. This is as true for email “from” eBay, Paypal and Amazon.com as it is from “your system administrator”.

Strike two on this email, btw, is if you look at the address of the sender, it’s probably something like:

I’m willing to bet a big bowl of fresh blueberries that your ISP doesn’t own the domain “helpdesk.com” and if it doesn’t, why would it be using that as a return address?

In fact, if you try to respond, you’ll find that it is going to route to a public email service anyway. Mine was pointing to “help.desk095@live.com” which is an account that I imagine has been shut down by the time you read this.

The long and short of it is that any time you see the magic request to specify your password or other access code just delete the message.

If you’re not 100% sure, email your administrator with an address you know gets to them (or go through the admin help form on the Web site) and ask if there are any pending issues or problems. Odds are you’re good to go.

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Dave’s Answer:

Ah, spam, the bane of our collective online existence. It’s a pain and it’s frustrating how much time and effort we have to collectively expend trying to minimize its impact on our online experiences. Blech.

Here’s a fun fact that most people don’t know: CAPTCHA is actually an acronym. It stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” (Turing here refers to the brilliant computer scientist Alan Turing, who spent much time thinking about how to differentiate really smart computers from humans, to so-called “Turing test”).

I know you’ve seen these. Here’s a typical CAPTCHA from Google’s site:

The basic idea is that it’s some twisted or distorted or obfuscated text that you, as a human, will have no problem recognizing, but that a computer program would have a very tough time interpreting: if it can’t figure out the words shown, it can’t pretend to be a human and therefore can’t spoof the system.

Here’s another example, from Craigslist:

This one is more interesting in some sense because it’s the same basic idea, but this recaptcha is actually also a distributed solution to interpreting difficult-to-read scanned text in old books being digitized. Nice win:win!

Lots of sites use these, actually. Here’s one from Facebook:

Unfortunately, the simpler CAPTCHA systems have been cracked through various means, ranging from smart image scanning and analysis software to brute-force guessing (mapping captcha image file name with a solution) to simply showing the CAPTCHA in another context on an apparently innocent Web site and storing the values [innocent] people type in.

MySpace is late to the party, but its system is pretty typical:

Earthlink is a bit more colorful:

And, finally, here’s what Yahoo uses:

They’re all using the same basic concept and it works, though it can definitely be frustrating when they twist or distort the text too much and just cause a headache.

I would say that if you are having spam problems on your site, it’s quite probably from automated tools pretending to be humans, and a CAPTCHA system might well be just what you need to make the problem disappear.

If only it were so easy to make the spammers disappear.

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Dave’s Answer:

This is one of the great puzzles of the Internet age, I think, the question of why some people get so much more spam than others. I know that I have multiple accounts on Gmail, for example, and some of them get a lot of spam (100 or more daily) while others seem to be completely off the radar and receive zero spam.

My theory is that there are two key factors: where you use your address, and whether your email address is an easily guessed “dictionary” word or phrase.

The worst case scenario is that you’re “john.smith@gmail.com” and that you use that email address to register on a wide variety of different sites and services. That’s a recipe for trouble.

While most of the sites you encounter on a daily basis are probably clear and honest, it’s not hard to imagine how the sequence of events might go: you register on legit site A, which sells its mailing list to reasonably legit site B for a one-time mailing. It generates revenue and helps keep the company in business. Site B sends out its one-time mailing, but also “accidentally” keeps a copy of the list for a second mailing that it never actually sends.

A few weeks later, however, company C contacts company B and expresses an interest in buying any sort of qualified list they might have, for big bucks. What the heck, right, it’s a good offer, so company B sells it to company C, who then resells the list to spammers at $1/addr in mass.

Now with just a few hops, your email address has traveled into the database of people who are perhaps sending still quai-sorta related offers. But they have a partner company that is focused on the worst kind of spam and, well, $0.10/address is still revenue, right?

And so it goes…

The other side of this is that there are companies, though it’s kind of hard to believe, that send email to millions of variations of names, words, and common additional sequences, hammering big public servers like “gmail.com”. If your account is “dave@gmail.com” you’re just going to get more spam than “dave12taylor34@gmail.com” would (no, that’s not my addr!) because the former is trivially guessable and once a spam message is sent and doesn’t bounce back as “recipient unknown”, guess what? You get a lot more. Then a LOT more.

There are likely additional reasons that might explain why your brother gets so much more spam than you do, but I’d just suggest that, for now, you don’t tell anyone about your luck, in case you mess things up.

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