Help us prevent Spamming in the Community!

Genevieve P.

Hello to all our wonderful Community Members,

Some of you may have seen email notifications come through with posts this week containing obvious spam & false advertising with phone numbers and links. Our Moderation team is actively monitoring the site and doing our best to catch, and ban, any and all spammers (as this goes against our Community guidelines).

However, we need your help!

If you see any posts in the forum that contain obvious spam content, please use the flag icon to flag this as spam.

This will immediately hide the post from the public site and allow our moderators to manually review the content to determine if the post is legitimate or not.

We are so grateful for all of you, and for all that you do to make this Community a safe, engaging, and productive space to be in!

Thank you,
Genevieve

Stefan

hi @Genevieve P.,

will certainly do!

Up to now the admin team has been quicker to flag 👍

greetings from

Frankfurt👋🏻

Andrée Starå

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/124769/help-us-prevent-spamming-in-the-community

Hi,

I hope you're well and safe!

I've been clicking the Spam report as crazy! 🤣

Be safe, and have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Sarah Donnelly

Hi @Genevieve P.

I am the Sys Admin for my company. I'm sure Smartsheet is working hard The amount of spam community notifications I still need to delete from my inbox each morning is extraordinary. I am starting to hear very jaded comments from our staff about the Smartsheet community due to the daily overwhelm of spam notifications in their inboxes.

Is there any type of progress report that I can share with our staff on this issue so they can feel assured Smartsheet is actively working to stop the spam posts coming into the community to begin with vs. just clearing out the posts once they are already here?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Sarah Donnelly

I completely understand how frustrating this must be for you and your colleagues, as it is for us. We have a number of preventative measures in place that stop posts from becoming live on the site. I know they may not feel like they're working at the moment, however more than 80% of the content this last week has been successfully blocked.

That does leave the posts that you're seeing to slip through the cracks and we are still actively working on a number of mitigation steps to decrease that percentage.

This includes adjusting our user posting limits, adding a "human" checkbox challenge, monitoring specific domains and IP addresses, and a few more recent efforts I won't make public (so as not to expose our processes).

In regards to the emails, I would suggest adjusting your notification preferences for a few weeks until things quiet down. You can still follow a topic to see it in the Weekly Digest without receiving notification emails when a new post is added.

I would personally un-check this box under the email setting for our public categories, and only keep it checked for the topics where you know Admins and Employees are posting (Announcements, Community Corner Newsletter, Best Practice, etc).

Profile > Edit Profile > Notification Settings

Scroll to the bottom to see the Weekly Digest Email:

If you check the "send me the email digest", then when you click Manage Followed Categories you can receive the weekly update instead of individual new posts as they come in:

Since the spam posts will be deleted by the time the newsletter is sent out, this will prevent your inbox from being flooded. You can of course keep the notifications in Community (bell icon) if you'd still like to see all new posts in a specific topic.

Thank you for reaching out, and I hope this helps.

Genevieve

Kyle Morgan

Is there a way to report a Member of the community for sending Spam directly to a person's inbox?

I have no idea who this person is - but a quick search discovered that they are active here in the community.

The number of "Let us help you build Smartsheet Solutions" spam emails from community members has been steadily rising. I have not "connected" with these individuals and I have never given them permission to contact me directly.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Kyle Morgan

Community Profiles automatically hide your email unless you choose to publicly show it or post it in the forum (which is advised against in our Guidelines).

If you have received spam in your personal inbox regarding Smartsheet, you can report this to Smartsheet using the email address in this Help Article: https://help.smartsheet.com/articles/2476696-what-to-know-about-smartsheet-and-spam

Thank you!
Genevieve

Kyle Morgan

Thank you, Genevieve

My email address has always been hidden. Oh well. No worries. I will report the email via the link provided.

Thanks, again!

Kyle