At this point, the automatic spam/vandalism filter is really getting beyond ridiculous. I got banned from contributing to the HookPad database yet again, as I found out by getting redirected to the home page with a very warm and friendly message telling me “Your account has been flagged by our spam filter. Please contact support for assistance if you think this was a mistake.”, but this time, I literally just submitted a new song as a TheoryTab, and even left the edit note blank (as suggested by multiple admins to avoid getting auto-banned).
When, if ever, is this system finally gonna be fixed? If this goes on for much longer, I don’t think HookTheory will have much of an active userbase left, as most people don’t really like constantly getting banned for no reason, having to manually request to be unbanned again, and then wait for another 1-5 days for the admins to read the request and actually unban them. Why not just implement some sort of whitelist, as has been previously suggested, so normal users like me can contribute just fine without constantly receiving false auto-bans?
Then, that malicious character could be manually removed from the whitelist again by the admins, and would probably get perma-banned by them as well. To streamline this process, a report button could be added so you can report users you believe are abusing their whitelist privileges to shit up the site, after which the admins get notified and can decide whether or not to follow up on your report (with a possible new rule that prohibits repeatedly filing obviously false reports, to harass innocent contributors by turning them into suspected vandals or possibly getting them falsely banned, or to overload the report database with the intent of making it more diffuicult for the admins to find actual trolls/vandals in a sea of false reports).
The purpose of such a whitelist would mainly be to prevent obvious vandals and trolls (with newly registered or alt/rereg accounts) from fucking with the TheoryTabs (e.g adding troll contributions, blanking tabs, vandalizing chords progressions and/or melodies, making ridiculous changes to song keys/modes that are obviously objectively wrong, ruining YouTube syncs, etc.). The whitelist could work by, for example, the admins manually adding known, regular, benevolent contributors like us to the whitelist, and allowing for contributors who haven’t yet been whitelisted to contact the admins and send them a whitelist request (similar to how (auto-)banned users can currently contact the admins through support@hooktheory.com to request getting unbanned).
100% agreed. I feel like this spam filter is doing a lot more harm than good. Reverting a couple of bad changes and deleting troll submissions would be less work than manually unbanning so much people, especially considering that users affected by the filter are unable to do anything (I imagine some got demotivated heavily and just gave up on doing new contributions or edits, even if they got unrestricted in the end.).
Thankfully, the admins and tech support (Leo) are very friendly, and have unbanned me upon request every single time so far. However, I’m afraid that I’d immediately get auto-banned again if I were to try and submit the same tab that got me banned in the first place again, since the spam/vandalism filter would still remain unaltered and probably always behaves exactly the same way under identical circumstances. The only reason I could think of why the filter falsely detected my submission as spam would be that it was more than 30 seconds long, but there are countless of tabs that are way longer than 30 seconds.
The fact that you can now get banned for literally anything, even when you do everything right and leave the editor note blank when submitting a TheoryTab (without even being given any concrete reason behind the ban, mind you), will definitely be very demoralizing to a lot of people, and it’s slowly starting to turn me off as well at this point. Something definitely has to change about the current spam/vandalism filter, whether it be implementing a whitelist or fine-tuning the filter so it’s less trigger-happy yet still effective at banning actual spam/vandalism.
There is a white list of users that we can add you to so you don’t have to worry about ever getting banned again so a false positive should only ever happen once. I see you are now on that list so it shouldn’t happen again (If you do get banned again definitely let support know because that means it isn’t working as it should).
The history of all this is that the site was targeted by a bot farm that was automatically creating accounts and, probably using llm based agents, bombarding the site with vandalism faster than we could clean things up (picture hundreds of theory tabs with titles trying to sell viagra and financial scams). We’ve noticed that the bots still probe things every once in a while for weaknesses. They were relentless and very smart about avoiding all other things we set up (different IP address, getting around specific word based filters by using llms to change wording slightly over and over and over again as we reacted in real time. It wasn’t a fun couple of days).
There aren’t that many real people trying to create theory tabs so we think the best way is to use white lists plus a filter.
It’s a tough ask for this spam filter though because the edit comments plus title/artist are often only a few words which don’t look like a meaningful content sometimes. I don’t want to speculate too much, but the name of the song that banned you was “Las Vegas”, which I have a feeling made it think may have been gambling related.
Anyway, for anyone else who happens to read this. Don’t take it too personally if you get wrongfully banned. If you are contributing to theory tabs a lot it should only ever happen once, at which point you can get whitelisted by a human.
Do you know whether I was put on the whitelist before or after I tried to sumbit “Blaxxtom - Las Vegas” to TheoryTabs? I’d prefer to still be able to add this song to the database, but if I was already on the whitelist before the song got me banned, that means the whitelist wouldn’t be working as intended and that I"d get banned straight away again if I tried to submit this song.
EDIT: Nevermind, I just saw that I got an email back from Leo, and he told me that he added me to the whitelist in response to my last ban, to prevent me from getting falsely auto-banned by the spam/vandalism filter again in the future. However, I’m still kinda afraid that submitting “Blaxxtom - Las Vegas” to TheoryTabs again would somehow still get me banned by the filter again for some reason, even though I’ve now been whitelisted.
Had the same issue just now. I already contacted support via e-mail. I don’t know if this is what’s causing false positives for spam-related bans right now, but I got suspended after only changing the key and writing a detailed explanation as to why, linking official sheet music. Something similar happened about two weeks ago, when I wanted to replace a broken YouTube link. (FYI, many Lana Del Rey music videos, for example, aren’t available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and separate instances with a different URL exist for but are available only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – I don’t know why. I put this explanation into the comments before submitting and got suspended with a 403 (Forbidden) https status code). I refrained from changing links on those videos to avoid getting falsely flagged for spam again.
Update: I’ve decided to add “Las Vegas” by Blaxxtom to TheoryTabs anyways, just to see what would happen, risking potentially getting auto-banned yet again. To my relief, it got through without me getting banned, so the whitelist feature is definitely correctly doing its job so far!
I assumed that moderators/leaders would’ve been added to the whitelist by default. Anyways, the feature for whitelisted users to be able to see a list of all other whitelisted users would be a great addition, but I think it should be made so it can be exclusively viewed by whitelisted users themselves (to prevent abuse by trolls, such as them filing false reports/takedown requests and harassing whitelisted users).
In this way, whitelisted users can request for other non-whitelisted users who they believe deserve to be whitelisted to be added to the whitelist as well, or contact support if they believe another whitelisted user is clearly abusing his whitelist privileges (repreated trolling after having been warned, vandalizing TheoryTabs, posting actual spam, harassment against other users, filing false reports/takedown requests etc.).
