Hi @Shane1 , what happened to this discussion? This weekend we had a guy asking people to transfer him money but users couldn't find a way to report him. 

Being able to report inappropriate content you receive via PM is vital to keep the community safe. 

Hi @Gabolino, I agree that it would be very beneficial to have this kind of report functionality. Would you mind submitting it as an idea? As we haven’t yet got a solution for this.

If you erase the user who sent the spam PMs it will also erase the PMs they’ve sent so that's the best option for now, but a user does need to first report to you that they were sent the spam PMs before you can erase the user who is sending spam.

Hi @Shane1!

What’s the status with this discussion? 

Do you guys have any plans on building some sort of a spam filter to private messages? Or are you still planning on rate limits to PMs?

Hey @Suvi Lehtovaara - at the moment, we don’t have any active plans to build a spam filter for private messages or add rate limiting.

I do agree with @Gabolino’s statement here:

Being able to report inappropriate content you receive via PM is vital to keep the community safe. 

I can especially imagine for new community members it sets the tone badly if you get spammed in your inbox and have no way of resolving it.

So it’s something we’ll consider - but to confirm, for now there’s nothing planned

Hiya!

I’ve managed to locate the Idea post over at 

In the meantime, there’s also a bit of a safety measure that members can use in the meantime though. @Kenneth R accidentally “tested” it on me a few days ago.

If you head into your settings, you can flip this switch to People You Follow.

With this turned on, only those who you follow can send you PMs, but you still have the ability to send PMs to anyone who either follows you or has them unlocked. If there’s members who you send PMs to frequently, it might be worth following them so that they can always reach you, even if you do have to lock down your inbox temporarily. I’m not sure if Moderators can bypass this feature, so if there’s any Moderators that you get on with, it might also be worth following them as well to guarantee making sure they can break through.

It’s not perfect, but may help if you’re getting heavily targeted.

Hi guys, I am not sure if this idea would help in your scenario. Basically it is about restricting guests to submit private messages. In our case, it will help as all of our customers and partners have respective user roles “Customer”, “Partner”, “ISV” etc. Users with the role “Guest” are the users who are not identified in our DB as existing partners or customers. We want to prevent spam by controlling guest role users'' ability to send messages. Vote for this idea if that would be helpful for you too. 

Big plus to this thread - We are experiencing more and more PM spamming and our users are growing frustrated that they cannot report it outside of screenshoting and sending an asynchronous email to our community team. It’s a really limiting function of the platform and surprising it’s not something clearly on the roadmap as there are few things that diminish the trust/use of a platform more than spam messages. 

On a related note, we’re also experiencing a significant increase in spam forum posts. The baked-in spam detection misses most of these. Any plans to improve this or ability to customize it to tighten the parameters so it catches more? 

Thanks so much - I appreciate your input!

Howdy @Michael !

Want some good news? And I mean really good news that you will love to hear. This is currently in progress and @xiaoyu-shen is looking for feedback about the design concept. Fancy checking out these for her?

https://community.insided.com/ideas/report-spam-from-the-private-messages-3134

Hopefully it helps there! As for the spam posts, the platform should learn over time, especially if you continue to mark those posts as Spam which automatically bans the member as well as helping to train the platform to detect them. You may want to make sure you’ve definitely got the anti-spam enabled though! If you still get stuck there, feel free to call in the cavalry, no doubt @Julian will have a few tricks for ya. :)

I will admit that you do also benefit from the power of the Blastoise AntiSpam service. I am extremely rapid at flagging spammy junk at my home base - and here - which not only helps to train the spam filter for the places I patrol and protect, but also helps to train it for everyone else too, including your community. 

Hey there!

Recently I’ve seen moderators on our team getting messages from users in a style like below.

Would love to see best practices that people have done to tackle this + anything the Insided platform itself can do to mitigate these messages from the user and moderator experinece.

Are there any updates regarding the features mentioned previously in this thread?
Thank you!
Alex

Hi @alex.hong! The feature to report a private message is still in beta, but if you’d like to make use of it already, I can enable it for you. A few things to be aware of with the current capabilities of this feature: 

• the end-user cannot delete the reported message and cannot block the sender from further contacting them (unless that sender was banned in which case they would not be able to contact anyone)
• the moderators/community managers cannot see a list of reported PMs in Control, these are only shown in the email notification
• the email notification will be sent to the same address as the rest of the moderation notifications
• from the email notification, the moderator can navigate to the sender’s profile and ban that account. 

In terms of best practices, we would advise to make clear in the community code of conduct any behaviour that will not be accepted and would be sanctionat by banning the user for a limited or unlimited period of time. 

@Cristina does the censorship filter (banned words) work at a DM level? 

Unfortunately, it doesn’t. The blocked keywords and spam detection cover only the content types, not the private messages service. 

That could be a game changer. Without any sort of censor mechanism DMs can become the wild west and unfortunately I speak from experience. 

Glad you released the ‘report DM’ feature though. 

Hey @Cristina !

Sure thing! Would love to have even a beta be available for our community users and moderators to use. What would be the next steps to get that enabled?

@alex.hong the feature is now enabled on your community. Please reach out in case you have any questions! 

Any chance we can also get this beta feature enabled? :) 

Sure, @Michael! The feature is now enabled for your community. 

@Cristina  we just had an incident with a spammer sending mass PM’s. It took hours for us to get the info and the spammer was able to send hundreds of pm’s in the meanwhile. Would it be possible to be added to the beta?

Hi @Suvi Lehtovaara! The feature has been enabled for your community. Let me know if you have any questions about it!

Hey @timcavey , would you be interested in having this turned on too? I would ask inSided to enable it now for ya, but I’d rather check first to make sure.

yes please @Cristina we’d like to be in this beta testing for reporting PMs as spam!

Hi all,

I think that this problem with Private Messages and Spam is related also with the Idea I opened some time ago. I’m posting the link here in case you want to upvote the idea as I think it will help to prevent much of the Spam in PM

Thanks