Forum moderation and advanced spam protection

One of the important aspects of running a user community is making sure that the user-generated content is moderated properly. And chances are, when you have an active audience engaging with each other, you will find that some of your topics are being spammed with promotional posts and third-party links. While removing each of these posts manually would work for smaller communities, it doesn't make sense for you to do it repeatedly when you have hundreds of spam posts coming in everyday. 

With Freshdesk, you can easily filter out unwarranted replies and spam links from being shared with your customers. You can set up moderation workflows to ensure that suspicious posts don't go live immediately, and instead come to you for approval. Here's a complete flowchart to show you how this works:

Turning on forum moderation in Freshdesk:

You can turn on forum moderation by going to Admin > Channels > Portals > Settings. Based on the size of your community, and your specific requirements, you can choose any of these options to implement an approval process with your forums. When you choose to enable moderation, a new section will appear on the sidebar of your Forums called Waiting for Approval. You'll then be able to approve or disapprove posts from there. 

The following are the various levels of moderation that you could choose from for your community forums:

• Moderate all topics and replies containing external links - Freshdesk will automatically mark posts which have third-party links to be sent for approval
• Moderate all topics and replies - All posts and replies in your community will be sent for approval
• Do not moderate - None of the posts will be sent for your approval

You can also enter the names of the agents to whom you'd like a notification about moderation and spam sent to. 

Note: This notification would be sent out once a day to these agents based on the helpdesk's business hour settings.

Managing spam posts in your community:

To make your life easier (and make it a lot harder for people who post spam), Freshdesk uses a one-click mark-as-spam system that takes care of all of your moderation requirements at one go. 

Every time you mark a post as spam from the Waiting for Approval section:

1. The specific instance of the post will be removed permanently.
2. All posts made by the user in the past will be removed automatically (so that you don't have to track back and see their history).
3. The user's account in your support portal will be removed automatically (so that they won't be able to come back and post more spam).

This process can be especially helpful when you are trying to stay on top of a huge number of topics or when you are trying to run a cleanup operation in your community. 

However, you'll have to make sure that you refrain from using the Spam button all the time. For example, if you just want to remove one post, you'll need to use the Delete option instead. This way, you can make sure you can take care of one-time spam posts from a community user without banning them from the community altogether. 

Forum Moderation Widget on the Dashboard:

Agents who have rights to moderate forum posts will be able to see the Forum Moderation Widget on their Dashboard. This widget will give agents a count of topics that are waiting for approval and the count of those that have been marked as Spam.

Note: Forum moderation works only for your customers. If you are an agent trying to make a post, it will not be submitted for moderation and will be published directly. 

One of the important aspects of running a user community is making sure that the user-generated content is moderated properly. And chances are, when you have an active audience engaging with each other, you will find that some of your topics are being spammed with promotional posts and third party links. While removing each of these posts manually would work for smaller communities, it doesn't make sense for you to do it repeatedly when you have hundreds of spam posts coming in everyday. 

With Freshdesk, you can easily filter out unwarranted replies and spam links from being shared with your customers. You can setup moderation workflows to ensure that suspicious posts don't go live immediately, and instead come to you for approval. Here's a complete flowchart to show you how this works:

Turning on forum moderation in Freshdesk:

You can turn on forum moderation by going to Admin > Channels > Portals > Settings tab. Based on the size of your community, and your specific requirements, you can choose any of these options to implement an approval process with your forums. When you choose to enable moderation, a new section will appear on the sidebar of your Forums called Waiting for Approval. You'll then be able to approve or disapprove posts from there. 

The following are the various levels of moderation that you could choose from for your community forums:

• Moderate all topics and replies containing external links - Freshdesk will automatically mark posts which have third party links to be sent for approval
• Moderate all topics and replies - All posts and replies in your community will be sent for approval
• Do not moderate - None of the posts will be sent for your approval

You can also enter the names of the agents to whom you'd like a notification about moderation and spam sent to.

Managing spam posts in your community:

To make your life easier (and make it a lot harder for people who post spam), Freshdesk uses a one click mark as spam system that takes care of all of your moderation requirements at one go. 

Every time you mark a post as spam from the Waiting for Approval section:

1. The specific instance of the post will be removed permanently.
2. All posts made by the user in the past will be removed automatically (so that you don't have to track back and see their history).
3. The user's account in your support portal will be removed automatically (so that they won't be able to come back and post more spam).
   

This process can be especially helpful when you are trying to stay on top of a huge number of topics or when you are trying to run a clean up operation in your community. 

However, you'll have to make sure that you refrain from using the Spam button all the time. For example, if you just want to remove one post, you'll need to use the Delete option instead. This way, you can make sure you can take care of one-time spam posts from a community user without banning them from the community altogether. 

Forum Moderation Widget on the Dashboard:

Agents who have rights to moderate forum posts will be able to see the Forum Moderation Widget on their Dashboard. This widget will give agents a count of topics that are waiting for approval and the count of those that have been marked as Spam.

Note: Forum moderation works only for your customers. If you are an agent trying to make a post, it will not be submitted for moderation and will be published directly.