Personal Insights
Participate against spamming of SAP Community
No, I’m not talking about the Support Package Manager transaction code! đ
It’s a few months that I see weekly spam of questions or blog posts of the SAP Community. Today I was surprised to see a blog post with 6 spams in one month, that none were removed, none was reported to the moderators. I reckon that I didn’t see the five first spams, although I log in SAP Community daily and I look at many posts.
If you see such spams, please click Alert Moderator and indicate Spam reason. That’s quick and the spam will be removed in one or two days.
Message to spammers: if you feel that you have a good product then you can “spam intelligently” by writing a blog post to show your knowledge by giving some good tips to the community, and sign with your company name, maybe some people will want to know you better and will discover your product.
I consider that all people who hijack questions and blog posts from other people are not honest and I systematically report them.
Have a nice day without spam!
Sandra
NB: I tagged my post “abap development” as a secondary tag because I belong 100% to this community and I specifically want “my” community to be “clean”, but of course it addresses the whole SAP Community.
âŚnever seen any such spam, probably because Iâm not to active at looking questions. But if I do, Iâll report it, ok! Thanks for letting us know that those reports are ok/wanted!
(The first thought that came to my mind when I read your âno one reported itâ: maybe SAPCommunity users have somehow been discouraged from reporting inappropriate questions?!)
Some people post feedback comments saying that it's an excellent blog and at the bottom they will provide a link to some misleading website đ which if I find usually will report as spam, but will they be considered as spam? Cleaver marketing done there.. đ
In my experience, yes.
Well said. I always report spammers. I've even found a few long standing members who suddenly resurrect old questions to answer them with a link promoting some web site. Upon reporting, they get dealt with!
You are right Sandra,
And just last week I reported one.
Won't spare a single SPAM here and will hit the 'Alert' trigger whenever needed.
Thanks,
Sijin
Not sure why some comments look "fishy" to me when I scroll through the activity stream. But some either seem out of place or follow a certain pattern in wording which makes me take a close look. They more often than not turn out to be spam trying to hide as a complimentary comment on the blog post or question but then contain a link to another website. I regularly report them as spam and - time permitting - I also quickly check the poster's profile page to see if it's new and/or shows other recent activity in other threads which I then also report or at least mention in my moderator alert.
These usually get acted upon with a day or two.
Thank you to all, it's nice to see that the community stays vigilant to keep the place clean đ @ Joachim Rees Mahesh Kumar Palavalli Matthew Billingham Sijin Chandran Bärbel Winkler
Hear, hear! I always report those but many spam messages are cleverly hiding under what appear like a legitimate text. "Great blog, OP, the <subject of the blog> is an important subject." -> "Important subject" is a link that leads to a random 3rd party website.
Promotion of third-party websites via blogs is also frowned upon (thankfully). One needs to distinguish between offering information (e.g. a "how-to" / personal experience) vs. blatant advertisement. Sadly, too many examples of the "spam blogs" in The Tag We Don't Speak Of.
If someone wants to advertise on the SAP websites they really ought to buy the ad space properly.
A moderator flag in the account / profile would've been very helpful. I've just stumbled upon a rather prolific spammer who has been flying under the radar for a while already (account registered in 2017!). All of their comments are the same nonsense with a link but reporting 30+ posts is quite a chore.
https://people.sap.com/dunn_marian#content:comments
Well seen. I remember having seen his last comment in my "activities" and didn't care because it was completely credible and not interesting enough to make me display the full post, which would have allowed me to see the link and verify it. For the case I was mentioning, I just reported one, saying there was several others, and the moderator deleted all of them.
I've noted this in one of the alerts yesterday but so far only one comment has been removed. Reported a few more today, let's see how it goes.
When I see SPAM I always go to user profile and check other content of the spammer. For each SPAM item I alert moderator with:
âSPAM! User have to be blocked!â
P.S. If I see massive SPAM attack I am trying to send message to global moderator.
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Got a reply from the moderators that the spammer's account will be blocked, so we're good here.
I think when we see a comment that sound like it was written by someone very drunk and has a link it makes sense to check the author's profile for spam. These somewhat realistic comments can be difficult to spot.
Thanks again for the blog, Sandra!
Thanks, Sandra, for highlighting this for everyone. And thank you to the rest of you for acting upon it! As a moderator, dealing with spam comments and posts is probably the #1 thing that consumes my time, and it would be nearly impossible without the community alerting on suspicious posts.
When I check out a possible spam post, and determine that it is indeed spam, it is my practice to then look at the poster's profile and see about their other posts. Most of the time they only have the one post, and it's a new account created just to do this, but sometimes they will have several spam posts. After dealing with the posts, I then flag the account to the global mods for blocking. Dozens of accounts are reported and blocked each and every day.
Thanks for moderating the forums, Matt! I'm aware of how thankless a task this can be.
Cheers
Bärbel