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Having seen a lot of discussions on here from different community minds about dealing with spam, I really felt like this would be a great time to bring in different experiences from folks here on how they deal with it. 

I have to agree with @Fisz  though that this is an endless discussion topic. 😄

Today I’ve got someone who has been a wiz at dealing with spam on our community 🥷 and has been my community buddy on speed dial - @anirbandutta 

 

 

Some of his suggestions:

  1. Be prompt in your methods - Act fast on Spam. But make sure that you always report before you delete in order to help train the anti-spam of Digital Hub
  2. Doing a litmus test - try to ask the person you are considering as a spammer about  the intent of the post - 99% of the times they don’t care/respond, and you can take an action easily from there
  3. A complete profile on community - Ensuring that your members have completed community profiles will help separate them easily from the spammers
  4. Community reports of spam - If your community is automatically alerting you of spam, that’s a great sign that your community members care about your community.
  5. A fun thought of patting yourself on the back - you’ve got some level of awesome engagement in your community that’s making the spammer drawn to post there. 😉

 

One another thing I’d add from my personal experience is also to:

  • Watch out for interval spammers - a lot of the spammers get active during an event or a national holiday or an international celebration day etc. Just keep an eye out to catch them faster! 

 

How have you dealt with spam in your community?

What additional suggestions would you share, that worked for you?

Complete profile on community - that would be a nice feature too, to prevent some spammers.

According to the 1st point - the anti-spam learning algorithm - is it some “global” thing, that it’s gathering samples from all Gainsight powered forums? Or it’s per forum/community algorithm (so different communities have different anti-spam algorithm)?

As mentioned in my topic - sometimes the easiest method will prevent from spamming (like posting urls allowed only if user have 20 posts on his account, but full profile completion will somehow help in this case). But I think, that URL whitelist will be also a good option - of course, they still will be spamming (they just can post url as a “normal” text, not a hyperlink) - but it’s mostly for user safety (prevents users to enter malicious websites, because sometimes users click something without thinking 😉)

 

Of course community also helps to report a spam, but it’s very little percentage of people. I’ve noticed, that some users are using report function to reply on the posts (or just wanted to PM some specific user).

Thank you @Fisz 

As mentioned in my topic - sometimes the easiest will prevent from spamming (like posting urls allowed only if user have 20 posts on his account

Good point about the user earning credibility before they are able to post a url. Not sure we can tune the system for those kind of activity-settings, I would totally Vote up if you posted that as an Idea.

According to the 1st point - the anti-spam learning algorithm - is it some “global” thing, that it’s gathering samples from all Gainsight powered forums? Or it’s per forum/community algorithm (so different communities have different anti-spam algorithm)?

Ah… good point again.

The algorithm is Akismet and looks like they update their machine learning across websites and forums all over the internet via users calling out content as Spam - a very popular industry solution in this domain, but we can’t really gauge much, it’s ways of working, i.e. the What and How does it find a piece of content ‘spammy’.

Here is a great discussion by very pro Community Admins that goes deep into the subject of Spam and Moderation.

https://community.insided.com/dealing-with-spam-81/how-to-enable-the-spam-filter-and-moderate-spam-1716 

 

 

Ofcourse you have @Fisz … saw your Idea after I posted the comment and voted up

 

 

That’s what we are talkin about! 🎊 

THANK YOU @revote, @Chris Hackett 

Cleaned it up.

 

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