Pre-moderation on SCN
Earlier this year SCN came under a heavy attack by ‘professional spammers’. The spam postings included links that, when clicked, would download spyware on the member’s computer. While the SCN Team, moderators and our IT battled the incoming spam, we also implemented several mechanisms to prevent the attacks. One of these was pre-moderation for specific groups; such as new SCN members and SCN members who have not yet contributed.
In terms of creating content, pre-moderation ensures that content which is created is reviewed by a moderator before being publicly displayed on SCN. Members who fall under the pre-moderated group:
Can Create | Cannot Create |
---|---|
– Status Updates – Discussion Threads – Blog Posts in Topic Spaces – Documents – Comments on Blog Posts and Documents |
– Personal Blog Posts – Discussion Replies |
Be assured that we’re striving to minimize the member inconvenience while maintaining the security. One example is that SAP customers, partners and employees are exempted from pre-moderation.
ℹ To that end please note that the table above could also be modified in the future based on need.
For those who are being moderated, this means that you will see the following after posting:
Please refrain from posting the same content multiple times. Duplicate posts only create more work for you and the moderators. It also slows down the process, making the release of the content slower.
Once posted, your content will go into our moderation queue. Our dedicated team of volunteer moderators will review and release the relevant content as quickly as possible, often providing feedback on content that is not ready for posting. The moderation process could take up to 3 days, as there are over 400 spaces on SCN, with very high volume of postings.
Once new members are active and complete a few missions they will be moved out of the pre-moderated group. (Missions consist of actions like rating content, posting blogs or documents, answering questions correctly, etc.)
An additional spam preventative mechanism we had to put in place is a key word filter. If you happen to use a ‘filtered’ word in your content it will be automatically moderated even if you are a long time user who has contributed a lot (hey it happened to me!). Although we would love to share the list of filtered words with you, that would be counterproductive to spam prevention.
The good news is that we’ve been able to intercept all attempted spam posts for the past several weeks, and spam attacks have dropped dramatically. In order to prevent spam from returning we’ve decided to maintain our mechanisms, including pre-moderation. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused to new SCN members however this is to protect the community at large.
You, our members are the eyes and ears of the community. Likely you will encounter spam first. Please help us keep the community clean and read Reporting Abuses and Notifying Moderator on SCN.
We appreciate your support and understanding of these measures. Together we can look forward to interacting and keeping our community spam free!
Thanks for the clarification Gali!
It's too bad this is necessary, but I prefer this over spam anytime.
Cheers, Fred
I agree - sad it's necessary and somewhat dampens the spirit of 'open collaboration'. However in my eyes this trade-off has been extremely worthwhile as it makes the blog feed on twitter (my preferred mechanism for keeping on top of things) actually useful. Well done team for implementing and running this operation! 🙂
Thanks for the information Gali, previously my posts were moderated but I don't know why it is not happening now. Patience is needed before asking a question in SCN since the response of the question being moderated, it's tough 😕 .
- Midhun VP
Hey, that's what I asked for repeatedly while being a moderator, a user-based switch for pre-moderation. This not only prevents spam, but also points-hunting using clones, for example.
There will always be complaints by a few indignant people because their output requires approval by somebody else, or because they mistake SCN for SMP, but you can't make everybody happy at the same time. Overall this should improve content quality, else you can call me banana.
Now let's find out what those forbidden words are... 🙂
Congrats & Cheers
Thomas
Thank you all for your support!
Appreciate the clarification as I've seen the message popping up as well. Good move to prevent spam attacks and I don't have any issues with this being in place for the future.
Better use moderation than having spam everywhere.
cool. thanks Gali for sharing this information. 🙂
Regards,
Jitendra
Good information for me. Thanks Gali. 🙂
I assure you, reporting any spam like thing encountered if any, at once.
Jogeswara Rao K
This information is good and informative.
One suggestion I would have is to have somewhere where we can check the status of our pending posts. That way I can see that "alright, my post is still waiting to be seen by an admin so I won't go and repost the same thing again". Or even possibly saying what number the post is in the queue so that would also decrease the chances of having a repost of the same discussion.
While you can't see information of what's in the queue, you will receive a notification after your content was processed by an SCN moderator.
Hi,
Regarding the point - "Please refrain from posting the same content multiple times. Duplicate posts only create more work for you and the moderators."
Can the number of moderators be increased or moderators with different privileges be assigned. This way a first level of moderators(only for forums) can just stop some repetitive threads from being posted in the forums. Even though SCN has grown both in numbers and in quality, we still have people who are lazy to search the forum for answers and instead have it easy by by posting a new thread.
Thanks,
Benedict
Hi Benedict,
Our moderators are dedicated volunteers that take on an entire space.If a specific space is lacking in active moderation please send me a mail (my email is in my profile) and I will follow up. Our aim is to ensure active moderation in every space however we have over 400 spaces and aren't aware of everything. Its up to the community to let us know if a specific space needs more moderation or if someone is willing to volunteer for that role.
Thanks, Gali
Hi Gali,
Could you please help check into the below blog, it says - awaiting for approval, have raised the question on the same.
https://answers.sap.com/questions/13661914/blog-approval-time-awaiting-for-review.html
This is my blog awaiting review/approval -Â https://blogs.sap.com/?p=1562319
Thanks Kling for clarification...
Hi Gali,
Now this explains. Thanks for the clarification and information.
Regards,
Ariel
Many Thanks for the Information.
Best Regards,
Naresh K.
#SCNis10
Will SCN create a queue to see pending posts??????
Yes, the moderators have a queue to check moderation itens.
Is there a queue in our individual profiles so that we can see if our request is still pending? I was wondering because when i submitted a question the other day, it took a while to get approved and I wasn't sure if the moderators even received it, (i.e. if it didn't go through or something).
We can see the pending itens in the "Actions" tab.
Regarding time, as stated above and similarly answered on discussion thread Moderator???????? :
How many points/missions do you need to move out of the pre-moderation group?
There's no official amount of points and keep in mind that there are other filters in place that may cause your content to go into moderation.
Thank you for the answer Eduardo!
And how do you "show" that your an employee for an SAP Partner to be exempted from this moderation?
You'll need to register and login using a valid S user number ID issued by your company’s OSS/SAP Service Marketplace administrator.
Ok, thanks
But since this id is linked to my name and googling my name then give's a lot of results i dont want that. Can i give my id and can you approve this account?
I'm afraid we don't have the ability to create exceptions like this. Just be patient and you'll move out of moderation very soon.
Thanks for the Information...
Hi Gali,
I do understand and respect the policy of SCN to review the content for new users before it is being published/released. Since the time taken by the moderators is not definite and is dependent on time, resource availability and volume of data, can we have a place/column where a user can track the details of his/her post which is in queue for moderation. This is just a suggestion from my end.
For a new user, it might be a turn off to wait for indefinite time. With the tracking facility in place, a user can at least be assured and updated about the status whenever he/she wants to know. This will also increase the usability of SCN and communication won't be single ended. Lastly, then we won't have any questions posted on SCN asking for "Moderation policy or the time needed".
Thanks,
Arti.
Jeanne Carboni wrote this in another discussion: Please stop the CURRENTLY BEING MODERATED delay | SCN:
"There is an active SAP IT ticket in the current sprint cycle that will let us eliminate the wait time for discussions, questions and answers to be released. It is currently scheduled to go live on October 1, 2013. Relief is around the corner!"
That's great!
We do agree Arti and as Jurgen stated above hope to see relief soon!
However if at a later point there are still recommended improvements please create them on idea place and ask others to vote them up 🙂
Gali
Sure!
Thanks for your response. 🙂
~Arti.
How can I find out why a post was rejected by a moderator?
Click the Actions icon on top right of the forum
then the Notifications tab
you should find the notification about a rejection and hopefully a note from the moderator
Thanks for the response Jurgen L.
I do see the notification, but the post has been removed so I can't see if there were any notes on it from the moderator. Guess I'll just try to post again.
Thanks again.
the note should be in the notification, not in your post.
see this example:
I would recommend not to post it again, moderators do not gamble with users content. There is certainly a violation of the forum rules if content was rejected.
I personally would become pretty angry if you re-posted rejected content again, as this is clearly a violation of moderation guidance.
Just evaluate your post with the rules: The SCN Rules of Engagement
Use the search to make sure you are not asking basic question for which you can find the answer easily yourself via Google or SCN search.
OK, I understand. I am fairly new at this so I'm learning and I appreciate your feedback! I certainly do not mean to anger - my apologies if I did.
The message I received was :
Moderation Notification
Your content "New check date field on Off Cycle Workbench Replace Payment" has been rejected by an SCN moderator and is no longer visible in the community. Please see the Rules of Engagement for more information on why content is rejected.
I don't have the exact verbiage from my post (I should have screenprinted it - lesson learned). But I was attempting to ask if anyone else had the issue we are having (New Check Date entered on the Off Cycle Workbench Replacement is not overriding the original check date on a Replacement check as we expect it to). And if so, how did they solve it. Before I posted the question, I had Googled and tried an SCN search, but did not find an answer. Maybe this is too basic of a question?
Unfortunately the moderator has not left a note, not best practice as you do not know the exact reason.
I searched SCN with this term and got 16 hits: Off Cycle Workbench Replace Payment check date
using Google even more
You should be able to find your rejected content in your draft folder. click your picture on top of SCN page to get into your user, there click the content tab, and here select the draft folder on the left.
A note would have been helpful, especially for a new user like me, but at least I now know that I wasn't missing something - like a way to get to a note that was left. I, too, got several hits on Google and SCN that lead to a few similar questions, but not to an answer. Thanks for the info/idea to look for the rejected post in my draft folder. Unfortunately, it wasn't there. I have replied to an old 'Not Answered' post on SCN that had a very similar New Check Date issue asking if they had by chance found a solution(even though it wasn't posted). Hopefully, that was proper procedure and they can help me.
Kind regards. Bev
reopening an old discussion was probably the reason for rejection in that case. You should check the user who had posted this question, maybe he was not online for many years and would not answer your question.
It is much better to create your very own post, if you have not found any that you answer your question. This is more attractive than adding a question to other people discussions. Instead of asking just the author (one person) you could have reached many people with a new discussion. And if you got a proper answer, you can close the discussion by marking it correct answered, which you cannot do if you add your questions in other discussions.
Hi Bev,
I took a look at the moderation queue and seems that New check date field on Off Cycle Workbench Replace Payment was posted in the wrong space. I've now moved it to SAP ERP Human Capital Management (SAP ERP HCM), which I hope is correct.
This is a helpful document for these cases: Find Topic Spaces on SCN (Forums). The site index listing all spaces (forum) is also linked from the site footer.
Jason
Thanks for looking in to this, Jason.