During my time at ZURB, one of my inherited responsibilities was the Foundation Forum, a community for users of the Foundation framework. As the forum grew more popular, however, one of the largest problems we faced was an influx of spam. Spam posts not only disrupt discussion on the site, but certain spam terms (such as links to illegal streams of popular movies or sporting matches) have the potential to crash the site by causing huge influxes of traffic when indexed by search engines.
In addition to technical mesaures like optimizing site performance, adding a CDN, IP blacklisting and user blocking, I approached this as fundamentally a design problem. The main goals, in addition to stopping the spam, were to have minimal impact on the user experience of the site (so nothing intrusive like captchas) and to not create a large maintence burden for the engineers or customer support members assigned to the forum.
Variations on the post approval flow.
The first step I took was to ideate different options for a post/comment approval flow, and get feedback from the customer support staff and business development staff who had been moderating the forum. The moderation flow was designed to not only be efficient, but to also be able to stand on its own, leaving open the possibility of exposing it to community moderators in the future.
Overall layout for the admin dashboard.
In addition to the moderation flow, I used the numbers we were already computing to support moderation to develop a full admin dashboard. This offset the cost of the dev/design time, as well as furthered the goals of the product (the forum). The features of the dashboard included:
- Top Ranked Forum Contributors: including a link to email them directly, in order to generate sales leads for the Foundation certification.
- Top Forum Contributors By Posts Flagged: a list of who flagged the most spam posts so that they could be contacted about becoming a moderator.
- Spam Alerts: a list of users who had an unusually high number of spam posts or comments so that they could be easily blocked.
- Top Spam IPs and Email Domains: frequently abused IPs or disposable email domains that could then be blacklisted.
- General Analytics: for measuring forum performance ad engagement, as well as measuring the effectiveness of our automated anti-spam system (Akismet).
The final Foundation Forum Admin Dashboard (with some information redacted).
Overall, the entire project, including engineering implementation, multiple iterations and user feedback, was completed in under a week.
