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!
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