SPAM on Forums

  • 21 February 2014
  • 19 replies
  • 106 views

There are dozens of SPAM articles or messages created within our Forum everyday. This is very annoying for us as we need to keep clearing the forum everyday, but it is even more annoying to our real customer who are actually using the forums.

These type of SPAM messages create distrust in our customers.


Is anyone else having this same problem? Any fixes?


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19 replies

Hi Luis, 


We understand that spam turning up on your forum can be very annoying. We are working on fixing this, and will keep you updated with the progress. Thanks 

Same here. I just made a request for this feature.


https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/79019

 Hi Samyuktha, any update on this matter? Are you guys actually working on this or it is something to work in the near future?

Hi Luis, 


We are currently working on a spam filter for the forums. I do not have a concrete ETA, but I assure you that we are working towards fixing the issue. 


Thank you

Excellent news Samy! I will wait patiently for the fix. Please keep me posted.

Cheers!

 

Thank you Samyuktha for the update. 

SPAM messages and posts are still coming through (See screen capture below). Funny thing is that according to create a post on our Forum pages user must have an account, but that does not seem to do anything. Any news about this issue? Sorry to be so persistent on this matter but we have heaps of real customers who actually use our forum complaining about this issue and this is not good for our company.


 

Hi Luis, 


I understand how this can be frustrating for you. I have informed the team again, and we are working on fixing this issue. 


Thanks 



I get the Indian Movers spam almost daily.  Someone must have developed a bot for freshdesk forum spam posting.

I have just had the mother lode of spam dropped upon me. I get the movers too, but I have about 10 spam posts in each forum area (about 😎 so thats a minimum of 80 forum posts I have to clean up. If there is no way for this to be solved I would have to start looking for other help desk systems and attempt to get a refund as this is beyond a joke now. I am spending more time cleaning up spam than I am doing actually engaging with the users...


I have added a feature request which may make dealing with spam more bareable by being able to delete a user in a way which removes all their posts and tickets.

We are experiencing exactly the same issue here Lee, it is very annoying and what is even worse is that our real customers who actually use our forum have now stopped going there due to risk their computers for viruses and things like that. This is really bad and I am hoping that Freshdesk can come up with a solution real fast, otherwise moving into a new system could be the right choice.

It is a pain to dedicate daily time to clear spam, that is not good at all. Any news about this matter Samyuktha?

It was mentioned in my feature request that they will be implementing Akismet soon:


https://support.freshdesk.com/support/discussions/topics/112428


Not sure how long *soon* is though

I just had to delete three complete forums (only had a few real threads in them), but was easier than individually deleting all the post.  Very disappointed in the very least as we now only have one forum and will have to waste over an hour of resources deleting post....I had this same issue last month and had to do the same thing. Why is there not a fix?

Quick fix:
-Let me bulk delete threads. Add check boxes next to each one and let me select a bunch and then click delete. This should be easy enough to add in.




Freshdesk team implemented CAPTCHA when posting an article on the Forum, however this does not seems to be working for us. We are still getting a lot of SPAM within our forums. I hope they can get this sorted fast, it really is a pain to spend an hour everyday deleting spamy messages.

Userlevel 4
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Hello everyone, 


We have introduced the SPAM filtering feature for the forum posts in our last weekend release. 


From now on, whenever an end user creates a new topic or replies in a forum, we will automatically check if it is a spam. 

Only if it is passes this test and is identified as not a spam(new topic/reply), we will publish it. 


Whenever there is a topic/reply marked as SPAM on your helpdesk, you will find a SPAM folder within the Forums tab, as shown in the picture below. 

This will be accessible to agents who has the permission to delete the forum topics.


This folder will have all the topics and replies that have been marked as SPAM. If at all you think this shouldn't be marked as such, you will have the option to "Approve and Publish" it as well. 


Now, if the agent considers everything in here should be deleted forever, there is an "Empty Folder" option to clear out every thing. 


I know this has been causing quite a lot of inconvenience on your forums and hope this puts an end to all of it. 


Please do drop in your feedback.

Thanks,

Anna

Thank you, this is very helpful!


Even still, it does not solve the issue of it being very difficult and tedious to delete a forum topic.  Can you add a way to quickly flag existing topics as spam from the list view of a category?


The new solution only helps with new SPAM messages it catches, not ones that get through (or, in my case, the hundreds that are already there). 

Hi Elijah, 


Thank you for your feed back. Will pass this on to the team.


Regards 


Samyuktha


Did the SPAM issue get fixed?



Hello J Thomas Kay,




As mentioned in the previous reply by Anna, new accounts should have the SPAM filtering on forums with the option for moderation from the Blossom plan onwards.




https://support.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/195476-forum-moderation-and-advanced-spam-protection




Thanks,


Sudha