socialmedian: When is the Right Time to Build SPAM Protection Features?

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When is the Right Time to Build SPAM Protection Features?

Submitted by Jasongoldberg

Jan 03, 2009

Summary

When is the right time to build your spam protection features? Before spam hits or once it does?

At socialmedian we took the perspective of, "when you have a spam problem to fix, you'll then know better how to fix it vs. guessing up front on which spam-filtering/blocking model to implement."

Of course, the drawback to this approach is that you are likely to experience spam before you've put the proper precautions in place to prevent it.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), we're now starting to see some noticeable spam on socialmedian. Mostly thus far this has taken the form of spammers creating accounts on sm and then submitting spam links via comments to popular stories.

We'll now accelerate our plans on implementing spam blocks and filters.

A REQUEST TO SOCIALMEDIAN USERS: As with everything on socialmedian to-date, we ask you to please work with us on this. If you see a spammer on sm, let us know about it. Help us warn them that we will not tolerate it as part of this community. And, please suggest via comments to this post how you would like to see us implement spam filters.

Thanks!

-the socialmedian team

Comments (9)

Ahmednaguib,

Jan 03, 2009

Ban the spammers by blocking their IP addresses, and if its a beginner's mistake just block him/her temporary.

Jasongoldberg,

Jan 03, 2009

@nishith @sunil FYI.

Sbtigris,

Jan 03, 2009

Great info ..............@@@@@@@@@@@@@
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Nigelwalsh,

Jan 03, 2009

@jasongoldberg @nishith @sunil I was going to respond saying where do we report Spam to - is there an email address etc, but looks like they are at it here - have to see the funny side too. Perhaps we could have a news network called SPAM that allows us to filter the spam - e.g., if we share an news feed/comment to the SPAM network - then it automatically kills/disables the user account that submitted it. Or alternatively if we could reply to the user and @SPAM at the same time to delete it. just a thought... Maybe you add a rule that says 3 or more @SPAMS for a user flips them to suspend..

Jasongoldberg,

Jan 03, 2009

@nigelwalsh @sunil @nishith @ahmednaguib current plan is to enable any user to "warn" another user. Once a user's warn level reaches a certain level he/she would not be able to comment or post again until a review of some sorts.

Ahmednaguib,

Jan 03, 2009

@jasongoldberg great idea!, socialmedian is going to be clean after this :)

Problemsmith,

Jan 03, 2009

Good informative article.

Thomaspower,

Jan 03, 2009

@ahmednaguib clean it needs to be I agree with you

Gbnetx,

Jan 03, 2009

This is not S|M spam, per se, but I got an email flagged as spam due to two factors: (1) there was a link to a known bad site (at least as far as Spamassassin is concerned), and (2) The socialmedian.com email was coming from a server without proper (actually ANY) Reverse DNS.

The 1st item is something to watch for, but the 2nd is something in S|M's control to fix.