4 Replies Latest reply on Jun 19, 2012 8:46 AM by MickT

    Social Groups Blogging Spam

    MickT Expert
    MickT Jun 18, 2012 1:11 PM

      Hi everyone,

      I have a few different social groups that allow blogging and are being targeted for spam. I was wondering how or if anyone else has figured out a way to permission a social group in a way to prevent this. Right now, we simply watch the groups and see what is coming in.

      We cannot remove blogging from the groups, as we set them up solely as blog locations for other languages. We take a certain number of our most popular blogs and have them translated monthly.

      We cannot make the groups private, as that defeats the purpose of spreading the word far and wide in these other locales.

      I am open for any suggestions.

       

      Thanks,

      Michael

        • Re: Social Groups Blogging Spam
          sleslie2011 Advanced
          sleslie2011 Champion Jun 18, 2012 3:00 PM (in response to MickT)

          Hello Michael,

          We got hit by spammers pretty bad back in January. They went after the groups as there isn't the moderation protection. We only had a few open groups and decided at this time to make them private. This prompted us to revisit the positioning of Sub Communities vs. Social Groups- when to launch each one and the different levels of support, target audiences etc.

           

          We didn't leverage groups as language blogs. Are they spamming the blog posts? From a strategy standpoint would it be possible to deactivate discussions, documents etc in the open groups. I checked under our groups blogs Manage blog/blog options and you can manage collaboration on blogs to require moderation for comments.

           

          Feel free to reach out to me directly for detailed information on who was spamming and what we did to address. sli@qliktech.com

           

          Also interested in hearing- have you had any complaints from your english speaking community members regarding the other language posts displaying on main pages via aggregation widgets?

          Hope this helps

            • Re: Social Groups Blogging Spam
              MickT Expert
              MickT Jun 19, 2012 8:46 AM (in response to sleslie2011)

              They are actually spamming the blog posts themselves with spam content. Not the comments, but creating blogs in the groups. We've turned everything off within the groups, other than blogs. They are resourceful... and doing this by hand, I would think. The fact that we haven't been flooded would suggest they aren't scripted, yet. *fingers crossed*

               

              Since moderating blogs would cause delay for our PMs who blog in other blog locations frequently, I'm reticent to moderate the blogs. The community is rather active, and the alternate language posts don't stay in the recent content for long enough to bother anyone. When we attempted to use the same space as our english-lang blog, it did alarm people. They thought we were hacked.

               

              I will shoot you an email. I would really like to know how others are addressing the spam issue. We are rather uptight about keeping our community spam free.

               

              Thanks,

              Michael

            • Re: Social Groups Blogging Spam
              JasonLax Novice
              JasonLax Jun 19, 2012 6:53 AM (in response to MickT)

              Hi Michael,

               

              Spam of this sort is a plague on the internet.  You can switch to a moderated environment where new content (even just blog) must be approved by moderator prior to publishing.  This can create a backlog and slow down the pace of innovation.

               

              Our community remains open and we rely on members to report abuses.  Furthermore, I've setup dozens of Google Alerts that notify me when every a spam words is used in the community: Google Alerts - Monitor the Web for interesting new content

               

              An example query would be "site:[domain] bingo" or "site:example.com bingo"   I'd rather not repeat all the terms I've setup alerts for here...there's some real nasty stuff that gets used!  I've also setup Google Alerts to look for suspicious code such as inline CSS that allows users to dump tons of text into a page that is not visible to anyone except search engine crawlers. 

               

              Of course, this later option relies on your site being indexed efficiently by Google so that it catches spam as quickly as possible. Unfortunately that also means Google has seen it so your action needs to be prompts in order to maintain the perceived quality of your site's content.