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Q&A

Welcome to Codidact Meta!

Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.

Post History

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Q&A Implement a way to sort posts by recent comments, to make it easier to moderate them

Rationale Today I flagged an answer that was clearly spam. Then I decided to check the spammer's profile to see if there were more. And indeed, I found a comment that was also spam. One detail th...

1 answer  ·  posted 20h ago by hkotsubo‭  ·  last activity 15h ago by Monica Cellio‭

Question feature-request comments spam
#1: Initial revision by user avatar hkotsubo‭ · 2025-05-16T13:20:22Z (about 20 hours ago)
Implement a way to sort posts by recent comments, to make it easier to moderate them
# Rationale

Today I flagged [an answer](/posts/293837/293973#answer-293973) that was clearly spam. Then I decided to check the [spammer's profile](/users/108336) to see if there were more. And indeed, I found a [comment](/comments/thread/10209#comment-26648) that was also spam.

One detail that surprised me is that the comment was made 2 months ago, and nobody noticed. It was made in a question posted 9 months ago, therefore I guess the OP and all other users involved in the comment thread didn't access the site during this period. That would explain why nobody flagged the comment.

But another detail is that posts aren't bumped to the first page when there are new comments.

Currently when you sort posts by activity, it considers only edits and new answers. Checking today, if we sort the main page by Activity, the [post](/posts/292371) that had the spam comment is in the [third page](https://software.codidact.com/categories/38?page=3&sort=activity), and the most recent activity shown is "_edited 8mo ago_" (which confirms that it doesn't consider comments as an "activity").

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# My request

Is there a way to check for posts that had a recent activity in the comments? If there is (I just couldn't find it), then this request can be closed. But if there isn't, can it be implemented?

If we consider that any comment on the post is also an "activity", that [post](/posts/292371) would have been bumped, and maybe the spam could have been caught when it was posted. I just caught it today because the spammer posted a spam-answer 10 hours ago in another question, which was bumped to the first page, and I decided to check in their profile if there was more spam.

Had the spammer decided to keep only that comment and hadn't posted anything else (or posted only comments in old questions), it'd probably remain unnoticed for an even longer time.

Can we have a way to sort by recent comments, so cases like this can be detected more easily? It could be in the current "sort by Activity" (change it to also include comments) or a new sort type (e.g. "recent comments"). Or is that such a rare event that it's not worth the effort?

---

One could argue that, since the posts aren't bumped, the spam won't be seen by many people. But IMO it's still spam and it must be removed, regardless of how many people it can reach.

<sup>I originally posted this in [Software Development Meta](https://software.codidact.com/posts/293974) and was suggested to also post here.</sup>