It takes a village: Spam control

[Jay Cross]

Okay, a super-spammer left a comment on your page here with some nonsense about ring tones. I got 48 such comments. What a nuisance. Sorry for the bother.

When you notice something weird going on in our community, note it here. I'll monitor this discussion for your comments. With hundreds of eyeballs on alert, perhaps we can eradicate unwelcome intruders before they cause much mischief.

This community exists to foster enlightened discussion about corporate learning trends and innovation. Blatant advertisements do not belong here, so I'll be deleting self-serving promotional posts that don't add value to our discussions whenever I find them.

[Avneet Jolly]

Jay, we had a similar issue with our website. A user (or an extremely sophisticated bot??) actually signed up, activated the account & spammed >200 users. To prevent this from happening again, we installed a "captcha" widget which seems to have dramatically reduced the amount of spam. In addition, we have given a few super-users the ability to immediately terminate a user account if they see spam coming from that account.

Hopefully, Ning will allow you to do something similar.

[Matthew Bibby]

Jay, I have noticed that spam is becoming more and more of an issue on Ning - yet there doesn't seem to be any real solutions. I went looking to see if there was an Akismet type solution for Ning and only found this old post from '06 which gave me greater insight into why Ning approaches spam in the very 'manual' way that they do.

Avnett - great idea about giving your 'super users' ability to block user accounts . . .

[Kathy Jeep]

We have a spammer on the loose right now...

[Dr.Kumuda Gururao]

Yeah. Got a notification saying there is a comment, but none when I visited my website.

[Rebecca Vaughan Frazee]

Yes, it does take a village! One way to address it is perhaps to require the prospective members to be "screened" before joining, but I realize that 1)takes more time and effort on the part of the screener (or screeners/moderators), and 2)creates a sense of a 'closed' community requiring "screening" of members which could be a turnoff.

I was able to simply delete this person's comment from my own profile page where it was placed. Now I don't see the spam.

[Harold Jarche]

It seems that one of the admins deleted that account, as a couple of members have notified us. Thanks to the community for being vigilant.

[Terry Christian-Quinton]

I have two such comments, but do not seem to have the option to delete them (no 'X' or 'Delete' option appears next to the comments). Does anyone know if there is a work around to get them deleted?

Meanwhile, I went into my 'Privacy' options and set them (two places) so that I must approve all comments before they appear on my blog or comment wall. Could be a way to stop having these posts appear on your page at all.

Terry

[Melanie Rodgers]

Thanks for the reminder Terry; good idea.

[Don Bolen]

Jay, How to complete research paper writing on time? discussion appears to be spam. Certainly irrelevant.

[Kathy Jeep]

I think it's spam too... where to buy research papers.

[Jay Cross]

Yes, these characters keep popping up. We've had a dozen term paper cheats. jay

[Prashant Dobriyal]

Jay, my Ning site elearningadda.com was spammed last Friday by a user named Betta Neal. When I looked up the profile I found that while adding the profile information it had somehow overridden the required fields. Junk information was added even where the user needed to select from options.

This clearly is a work of a bot or a security gap in Ning. Manually banning spammers may be the only fool proof option for now. We can try third-party widgets like Captcha, as suggested by Avneet.