KickApps is powering websites for many major brands, tier one properties, professional sports teams and literally tens of thousands of mid tier and smaller web sites. Sites such asNew York Rangers, Bonnaroo, Planet Orange, OvationTV, and many more, draw a much deserved sense of attention to the KickApps platform. The larger a given platform grows, the more likely it is to be a target of spammers. Many of the top sites and social media engines on the web are targets as well, but here at KickApps we take spamming seriously, and are proactive in providing our customers with tools for preventing spamming.
Within the existing platform we have several anti-spam techniques that our affiliates can configure to prevent those annoying out-bound links.
- Email Verification - Enable email verification for new members. Upon registration, members will have to input a valid email address, then follow the link sent to them in an email. Our own studies show that this alone decreased the amount of active spam accounts by almost 55%.
- Automatic Approvals - Disable auto-approvals and assemble a team of editors to assist in your approval processes.
- Flagging Threshold - It maybe a good practice to set the flagging threshold to 1. However, be sure to notify your members that as soon as they see something that may be considered spam, to flag it. An email notification of every flag will be sent to the designated help address that was set when initially configuring your KickApps community.
- Notify KickDev - I have recently created a KickDeveloper message board thread where we can help each other moderate the spammers who make into our community. Visit this thread and give the rest of us developers a heads up!
If you follow these techniques, you will be able to limit the amount of spam accounts that attack your site. Although it is impossible to guarantee that you will completely eliminate spam, this a significant leap forward while we prepare a full featured spam prevention tool.
