Hi Breck,
It’s great to see some new Sybase folks “over here” on SCN joining in with the other 2 million visitors we see here every month.
Sorry you’re having trouble posting. For many years SCN did not require moderation for new members. We actually would have preferred to keep it that way. However, SCN became a victim of it’s own success. Over the last several years, SCN has implemented strong SEO practices that make it a very favorable place to post content that quickly is picked up by Google search engines. That’s been great for our members who like the fact that their new posts are quickly found by others looking to engage or to solve problems with their solutions.
However, what’s been good for our members also looked like an opportunity for spammers. In February, we were hit suddenly and aggressively with a flood of spam posts. Spammers found SCN to be a valuable place to post their content because it quickly got picked up by Google search engines. (For example, one spam post at the time received over 60,000 search impressions and 5,000 clicks.) Over the ensuing weeks, spammers created over 300 new SCN accounts and over 3,700 spam posts. Clearly that was not good for the community or for SCN since Google applies manual penalties when it finds spam on your site.
We worked actively to remove spam posts as they occurred and also implemented some new technical approaches to thwart the heavy spam activity. One of those is to require new member accounts to have their content moderated until they’ve earned a relatively small number of points so we feel they are trustworthy to be able to post directly. To date, those approaches have been effective in eliminating the spam we were seeing previously.
It sounds like you have some suggestions for other ways to solve aggressive spamming on community sites. We’d welcome your input. Feel free to comment here or reach out to me at chip(dot)Rodgers(at)sap(dot)com.
We hope you come to like the active and engaged community we have here at SCN and hope to hear more from you in the future!
Best,
Chip