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Starting to receive spammy posts that you don’t like? You can enable Spam Prevention on your community. This service will review every incoming post from registered users. If the service suspects the post contains spam it will be sent to the spam folder in Control and won’t be published on the community.

 

How To Enable Spam Prevention

  1. You have to be logged in as an Administrator
  2. Go to Control → Settings → Spam prevention.
  3. Check the Enabled button
  4. Hit Save changes, and you’re done: spam prevention is now enabled on your community.

Related How To’s

Note:

  • We recommend that you frequently check the spam folder in Control and unmark any valid posts that the spam filter marked as spam by mistake (also, did you know that content that isn’t spam is referred to as ham?).
  • ​​​​Members whose posts are marked as spam by the spam filter aren’t automatically banned. This is in case the spam filter accidentally marks a valid post that isn’t actually spamming. We recommend occasionally checking the spam folder and banning these members.
  • We use the services of Akismet to protect your community from spam. All data sent to Akismet is anonymized. By enabling spam prevention you agree to the Terms of Use of Akismet.

 

Hi Frank and others,

I was wondering if there any improvements on the horizon in regards to the spam filter? We’ve experienced quite a lot of spam at the start of 2020, but the spam filter didn't catch this or learn quick enough to stop new spam.

Now we're manually approving new users (which is also not the best solution, but there isn't really any other option), but the spam filter is marking spam very poorly. Superusers of our Community have been complaining for quite a while, because their responses are being marked as spam (due to a smiley, a link or a lenghty topic). We can't really do anything about it, since there is no other option then to enable or disable the spam filter. 

I was wondering if other users are experiencing issues similar to our problems and how they are dealing with this?

Thanks in advance!

Hi David,

thanks for sharing this with us here! Of course it is not a desired measure to manually approve all registrations - it not just takes a lot of time for the community team but also hinders your users from becoming active.

The spam prevention is constantly evolving, just as spammers keep finding new ways to work their way around the spam prevention. We stay in close contact with our spam detection partner here to make sure that the system works as good as possible. So we are always busy fine tuning and adjusting this system to reduce false positives and improve early detection of spam behaviour.

I am not familiar with the type of spam you are receiving on your community - usually the way spammers attack also determine the best way to prevent them from doing so. Sometimes it helps to block certain email providers / domains who spammers are using. Not sure if you have looked into this and let us know if there is a pattern?

About Superusers: If your superusers have the primary user role “Superuser”, then all of their posts shouild automatically be excluded from the spam detection. So my recommendation would be to give them this primary role. Because currently your superusers are only carrying a custom user role named superuser, this will not have the same effect. Once you have done this, it will at least turn off those complaints around false positives going forward.

Hope this helps at least a bit, with a little more details I might be able to help out with any further questions.

I’ve actually just noticed that the callout about how to handle members who get caught by mistake seems a bit strange. If a moderator here was to follow the advice it gives exactly, I’d probably have already been banned from the InSpired Community at least 20 times. :wink:

I think it might work a bit better if it was updated to We recommend occasionally checking the spam folder and approving these posts if you’re happy that the spam filter flagged them by mistake, or banning the members whose posts are definitely spam. Unless you really do want to ban every member whose posts end up in the spam queue that is… :sunglasses:

I hope this comment doesn’t get gobbled up by the spam filter though. I’ve had terribly bad luck with it so far and it seems to think pretty much everything I post is a free lunch.

Chiming in to also say we’ve been receiving a lot more spam lately. It’s interesting, because we officially launched our Community in Nov, but hadn’t seen spammy posts until now - nearly 8-9 months later. We launched the forum with some set rules in place about bans and warnings, but we may have to tweak these based on severity level of the infractions. We also added in key words into the filter to block posts that have pretty explicit terms. We just switched on the Akismet spam filtering last week, so we’ll see how that works out. 

Anyone else have tips on how they handle spammy accounts?

I’d love to know more about the spam filter.

Recently, a post in a public community group was marked as spam so it wasn’t published until I approved it and marked it as “not spam”. The author of this post did not receive a notification when the post went live, nor did they receive a notification when another user responded to the original post.

 

  1. Do users receive notifications when their post is marked as spam?
  2. Do users typically receive notifications when their “spam” post is marked as “not spam” and it goes live in the community?
  3. If a post is auto-detected spam and then unmarked as spam later, does this affect their notifications (like when another user responds to the post)?

 

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