Spammers on MyHappyPlanet
We have received a growing number of reports on spammers lurking around MyHappyPlanet. Thank you so much for helping us police the community. It’s unfortunate that we have people abusing the site and sending unsolicited and sometimes inappropriate messages to our users. We are currently working on a solution to address this problem. If you have ideas or suggestions to solve this issue, we would love to hear them.
In the meantime, if you receive unsolicited or inappropriate messages, you can do two things to report them to us. First, you may go to the profile of the sender and click on the “Report User” link at the bottom of the page. Second, you may write to us at admin@myhappyplanet.com and send us a copy of the spam message and the name of the sender.
2 comments
Hi Karen,
In communities even in forums, there’s always the same thing, spammers and other kinds of abuse are there.
In my case, the senders of unwished message have no photo and write their e-mail address down in messages.
I suppose checking both will save time to find them out.
Or implement some kind of validation that sender must have photo to write down e-mail address in message.
Of course, to distinguish good users from spammers is not so easy, but this may give some help, I think.
Looking forward to become this site another happy planet to live in!
Dear Karen, it’s not an unexpected problem and it’s a sign of success, so that’s a great thing!
I suggest you could have a ‘karma’ based moderation system. I think in this type of helpful supportive language exchange community there would be many people willing to volunteer to help, especially as it is free and they are getting something out of it. Recognizing those people in a way with Karma (or other similar forum ‘leveling’ system) would help the spam problem but also build the community spirit, and those people in turn become your most active ambassadors.
You could check out a good example at http://www.uniteddogs.com. It know the founders and they have grown a new community very quickly (now second largest dog/cat community after Dogster). Their site seems to have a very good forum moderation structure.
Also, if I could indulge. I notice many times on the site I receive an email notification for someone sending me a smile/message. yet when I click it, I’m not automatically logged in and taken to it.
I have to manually re-login (I don’t clear cookies or anything) and then once I login, I’m not taken to the messages. And when I get there, many times the message is not even there. Strange. Have others reported this issue before?
Keep it up..
Simon
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