Spam prevention
complete
M
Misty Guanaco
Recently, we've been getting a TON of spam. I think adding recaptcha would help a lot. See examples here:
D
Determined Bear
Just FYI, we're going to drop canny.io as a partner because of the lack of support of reCAPTCHA. We're gotten swamped with bots and spam, way beyond what a human admin can manage.
Sarah Hum
Hi Determined Bear, sorry about the poor experience here. Can you contact support to give some examples here of what you're seeing? We looked into your account and don't see a single post marked as spam (via Canny detection or your team manually). We also have recaptcha enabled for user actions, so any user leaving a comment or creating a post has gone through recaptcha. Would definitely like to see what we're missing!
Daniel Murray
complete
Howdy all,
We have shipped an update that allows admins to mark posts and comments as spam. You should see the option when you open a post in the admin view. Marking as spam will:
- Ban the author
- Delete all of the author posts, comments and votes
- Store data about the author and their spam for automated detection in the future.
Dan
S
Sharp Mandrill
Daniel Murray: nice work!
I
Indigo Wildebeest
Daniel Murray: is there a way to batch select and mark them all as spam?
Daniel Murray
in progress
Howdy all,
We’ve decided the best next action to prevent spam would be to implement a way for admins to mark post as spam. Doing so will...
1. Ban the post’s author
2. Delete all of the author posts, comments and votes
3. Store data about the author and their spam for automated detection in the future.
Dan
S
Sharp Mandrill
Daniel Murray: Hey Dan. I've got no skin in this game, as our board will be a private widget so we're not expecting spam! But I wonder why this is preferred to the alternative of a Captcha, configured so only boards that want one have it? That would reduce the amount of spam being posted in the first place, so you don't have to rely on reporting it retrospectively.
There's another idea about moderation which I wanted for slightly different reasons (preventing different clients accidentally sharing confidential info with each other). That's also a bit more preventative as you can review posts before they're published. Especially in B2B it can look unprofessional if there's spam so you ideally want to catch it before everyone else sees!
Just wondering why you prefer the outlined solution?
Daniel Murray
Howdy Sharp Mandrill,
A Captcha is a good solution to prevent spam generated by bots. However, through my research, it seems like a lot of the spam we are seeing is manually generated. We feel that this work will be a good first step to preventing that.
In regards to having a post review process, we have another post that address that specifically.
S
Sharp Mandrill
Daniel Murray: ah okay, interesting to know about the research!
Yeah have seen a different idea for reviews, just thought that request could solve this problem. Actually saw this one, as opposed to the one you posted: https://feedback.canny.io/feature-requests/p/post-visibility-and-moderation could they be similar enough to merge?
Daniel Murray
Howdy Sharp Mandrill,
I agree those posts are similar, but one is about visibility and the other pertains more to post approval.
C
Chocolate Louse
Daniel Murray: Hi Daniel, are you saying that a single report from someone will ban the author in Canny? Or we're talking about a few reports? Anyway, as a community app we have millions of such cases and unfortunately it won't work well. There will be people abusing the system (a few friends gather to ban some other people just for fun etc.). Happy to have a deeper conversation if you're interested in our experience.
Daniel Murray
Chocolate Louse: We're thinking jus the first time a user's post is marked as spam.
C
Chocolate Louse
Daniel Murray: Got it. Any thoughts regarding those who will be reporting others just for fun or because they don't like the ideas of others?
Daniel Murray
Chocolate Louse: We aren't convinced we absolutely need to pursue user moderation to address spam
S
Sharp Mandrill
Chocolate Louse: From his comment I think it's only admins that will be marking as spam, not other users, so I don't think that'll be an issue!
C
Chocolate Louse
Sharp Mandrill: Oh, I didn't get that. Thanks for clarification!
Daniel Murray
under review
Howdy all,
Wanted to follow up on this request. Since implementing SSO, are you still seeing spam posts?
Dan
S
Separate Unicorn
Daniel Murray: Yup, if anything the frequency of spam posts has picked up.
Daniel Murray
Separate Unicorn: Sorry to hear that, we're working on a solution to hopefully make it easy for our customers to identify and prevent spam.
A
Adjacent Egret
I periodically removing tons of spam. I contacted your support in the past and they suggested to use SSO and mining that we should fix this problem from our side.
I definitely agree that Canny should prevent automated spam posts, reCAPTCHA should help a lot.
reCAPTCHA v3 works imperceptibly by user, it doesn't require to pick "cars", "trees" and so on :)
Andrew Rasmussen
Merged in a post:
Add a way to report users who are using Canny to prompt for ads instead of asking for features
M
Misty Nightingale
Canny is flooded with ads. There's no way to even report this to the admin of that particular sub-domain.
Sarah Hum
Hi Zeb, wow this is not good. First time we've seen this! Thanks for reporting. Our team will chat about solutions.
M
Misty Guanaco
Sarah Hum: Thanks!