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5 Comments

Got excited. Wrote a long post. Only to find out that I can't post it on Indie Hackers

Indie Hackers is an awesome community where people are sharing even small wins to keep things rolling. I noticed I am getting organic traction on my side hustle and started writing to put down all my learnings, to finally realize its ~1000 words post. When I hit submit button, it says "You can't submit the post". That is it. No explanation.

Sorry for crying it out loud but felt like I wasted hours which could have been prevented if there are some proactive rules visible before submitting a post. The error message itself will let you bang your head and leave you clueless.
Anyone else faced a similar issue?

posted to Icon for group Meta
Meta
on May 10, 2021
  1. 3

    Yo @terminal_tty — sorry for the frustration. We have algorithms in place to prevent spammers from posting links back to their sites. Most likely these algorithms placed your post in this bucket. We don't display an explicit error message in these cases because then we'd be educating spammers on how to get around our measures.

    Try giving the post another shot. If it doesn't work, let me know.

    1. 3

      Thanks @channingallen for the quick response. So it is a feature, not a bug :). That makes sense.
      Anyways, I tried posting it without all the links. I even removed the image link from the post. Still the same error. Are you guys using some kind of model to detect spam posts. Naive Bayes may be? If that is the case, training data seemed to be very biased or non spam training data might not be broad enough to cover edge cases. Just shooting an arrow in the dark.

    2. 1

      By the way, I tried earlier but still not able to post. Any luck from the team looking into it? I may try posting after removing parts of post to see what works but I am afraid that might still be considered as spam.

  2. 1

    Yes, I tried submitting a post and got the same error message.

  3. 2

    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 3

      Thanks for checking by. Yes I filled the headline and posted in the text tab. Just to be sure, I am posting screenshots of the top and bottom of the post https://imgur.com/a/HysIVx7
      I have also read posts longer post in IH. So the length of the post shouldn't be a problem I guess.

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