SPAM Prevention for Public Communities

Overview

Some spammers cram AnswerHub instances full of popular keywords to try and rank the pages of their websites higher when people make searches with those keywords. This article explains what are the most common plugins that can be implemented to avoid such practices.

Information

With the rise of social media, spammers have been quick to take advantage of all the attention on those platforms, spreading their spam via bots and other sketchy accounts. Most social media spam contains links to commercial pages, which aim to increase traffic or revenue for a spammer’s website. AnswerHub offers currently 3 plugins that may be helpful in combating spam in public communities.

1. reCAPTCHA Plugin: The main goal of this plugin is to prevent spam by intercepting requests to register a new account, post new content, and even edit existing content. This can help defeat scripts written to create large numbers of users for purpose of posting spam. Once this plugin is enabled a few configurations become available (admin > site tab > reCAPTCHA config - /admin/recaptcha/config.html) so that you can determine when and who will be forced to use reCAPTCHA.
   
   
   • Allow your existing trusted users to automatically skip reCAPTCHA in two ways:
     • In the reCAPTCHA configurations change the "Show reCAPTCHA for logged-in users?" to skip if reputation is higher than X and define a threshold.
     • Once this plugin is enabled, a new permission to "Skip reCAPTCHA" is available. This may be Granted for trusted user groups, like the default Moderators group or a custom group of employees, so that they don't have to go through the validation process to prove they're not a robot.
       
       
2. Shield Plugin: The main goal of this plugin is to prevent spam created by human users from being published in your community. There are various configurations that can be tweaked to tailor this plugin to your community for better results, and configurations will be iterative - adding new keywords and patterns, and adjusting thresholds as the admin observes undesired content that makes it through to the community. These configurations can be found by going to the admin > content tab > and clicking on the Spam Protection Configuration link.
   • In order to reach the configurations available with our Shield Plugin you must have the "Spam Moderator" role granted to the user. If you don't, you'll receive an access denied message if you attempt to navigate to the configuration settings.
     
     
3. Akismet: This is a relatively new plugin that was added to the 2.X versions of AnswerHub. Like a shield, Akismet can be set to exempt based on reputation points, and it is a good strategy to set the exemption value low at 5 or 10 reputation points to reduce the API traffic going to the Akismet service. Clients will need to sign up for their own Akismet account, and at some volume levels there will be a cost to the client (not charged by AnswerHub), so optimizing the number of calls made to Akismet will help the client manage cost.