community – Grey Panthers Savannah

I’m the spam killa’

gpanther — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:05:00 +0000

I’m happy to announce that I’m one of two “spam killers” on the Software Engineering radio website. Spam was starting to run rampant on their site, so they asked for help and I responded. It is so simple to donate your time to a worthy cause. You to can do it, it takes just a couple of minutes per day!

PS: If you are interested in software development / design, this is definitely a podcast you should give a listen.

Picture taken from Manuel_Marin’s photostream with permission.

Careful with that UGC, PCWorld!

gpanther — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:09:00 +0000

I was reading PC World article when I saw the “active” forum topics:

My thoughts were:

Their forum must be really low volume if these spammings managed to get to the top
UGC (User Generated Content) can easily put your website in a “bad light”, so you should be careful when using it.

Some ideas on how this could have been prevented:

Provide an easy way for other users to flag messages as spam
Only advertise on the first page topics which have at least one response and wasn’t flagged as potential spam.
Use a list of keywords and quarantine posts which contain the given keywords: only show them to the IP address which originally posted it. Of course, such postings should be reviewed and innocent topics be removed from the quarantine status.

This last method leaves the spammer with the impression that the posting was successful. Directly blocking it would just create an arms-race. (This idea is not originally mine and it has been floating around on the intertubes for some time. It is surprising that so few community software packages implement it…)

Threaded vs. Flat discussions

gpanther — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:08:00 +0000

This post from Coding Horror talks about a subject near and dear to my heart: the usability of the discussion boards. Here is my take on what constitutes an easy to use environment:

Flat discussion works best if few replies are expected for a given topic. You can make sure of this by splitting up the conversation by topic.
Threaded discussion can be usable, but you must make sure that the user can keep track of the context. Two negative examples: the comments for Security Focus articles. More precisely: the way that the expand all link works (it shows a only a little bit of each post instead of showing the full text, making it unusable). An other problematic site: TechRepublic. Their biggest problem is that the post is placed at the top, without regard for its position in the tree. While this may eliminate some design problem, it completely breaks the association between the post and its context. Now a good example (IMHO): CodeProject. It uses javascript to load the message you request and display it in-line, keeping the context. When javascript is disabled, it uses server side scripting to imitate the same behavior (you can test this easily if you are using Firefox with the NoScript extension).
For returning members it is very important to quickly find out what’s new. While the method of color-highlighting commonly used kinda works, the best way IMHO is to create an RSS feed for your forum.

And remember: software is not the solution, it’s just a tool. You can find articles and podcasts (part 2) about the human element which the most important factor in the community.