Spam Monitoring Service Update

[Josh]

Last year we introduced a Spam Monitoring service to combat the increasing problem of registrations on communities from spam accounts and the response to this service has been great! The spam service has been a great success so far and we would like to take the time to share some stats about how effective the service has been.

The service is only as effective as the number of communities that sign up and report data back to our system, so we are happy to report that thousands of communities have joined the service and are helping each other to reduce the amount of spam each receives. If you have not yet signed up, we would encourage you to take this opportunity to do so: the Spam Monitoring service is free to all active IP.Board license holders!* It is a great way to improve and protect your community while saving you time.

Thanks to the network of communities that have joined this service, we have been able to block tens of thousands of spammers from registering on communities that participate in this service! The spam service itself receives thousands of requests per hour and continues to build its database from that data. As always, your registration data is kept safe and is not permanently stored as transmitted data is only used to detect spammers.

We are continuing to monitor everything that is reported and look for trends to help the system better identify spammers that are registering on your communities. If you are signed up for the service and a spammer does register, please remember to use the Mark as Spam feature (both in the IP.Board AdminCP and the front-end for moderator use) so that we can receive that data and use it to improve the service for everyone.

If you are signed up for the spam service, please take a moment to check your logs (in the IP.Board AdminCP) and make sure that the service is working for you. We have noticed that some sites do not have the correct URL for their site so their requests to the service are not working as a result. If you are having any issues, please open a ticket and let us know.

New in IP.Board 3.1

Most of the processing for the service is handled by IPS servers but we are adding two enhancements in IP.Board 3.1: reporting false-positives and statistics.

Reporting False-Positives

Just as your email client sometimes flags a legitimate email as a spam message, our service sometimes tries to be a bit over-protective and will flag a legitimate account as belonging to a known spammer. You can currently "un-flag" that account and restore it to normal but that information is not passed back to IPS so the service could learn that a particular account was actually legitimate. In IP.Board 3.1, removing a spam status on an account will be reported back to IPS to improve the service.

Statistics

IP.Board 3.1 will include reports and graphs on how the service is protecting your individual community.


We hope you continue to enjoy the protection the service offers and if you have any suggestions, please post in our feedback forums. Thanks!




*The following packages include the services option, which the spam service falls under, and qualify to use the service at no cost:

• IPS Hosting clients
• IP.Board Standard License
• IP.Board Business license
• IP.Board Community Suite license
  

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