How to avoid issue with ISP over spamming by members?
Our site is an invitation-only career site for top-tier professionals and we encourage members to invite others they know on the principle that good people know other good people. Although we have all the proper language on our site and invitation templates to guard against spamming, the challenge we have is that a few members may send invitations to a large contact list, sometimes to people that they do not know well. As a result, we have occasional complaints about spamming and we are concerned that this may eventually lead to our ISP terminating our account.
Isn’t this a common issue for any site that allows their members to send emails to others? What is the best practice to control spamming by members? More importantly, how to we avoid the issue with ISP terminating our account because of spamming by our members, which may happen from time to time?
One option we are exploring is to use a mass mailing service to send invitations rather than doing that directly from our site. Any feedback on this approach? I'm curious what other social networking site does.
Any advice is much appreciated. If you know of anyone who is knowledgeable about operating a large social networking site like ours, I would appreciate an introduction to learn about best practices on anti-spamming.
Answers (4)
Sheilah E
Owner, ★SME Management:.......... Business Management and Accounting Consultant
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If you were to limit the number of invitations each member can send in a given time period that may prompt them to be more selective as to who they send them to. For instance many sites do allow the invitations to go out in mass quantities and 90% of the recipients feel they are being spammed, just as others are feeling it from those bad members who are spamming. By limiting the number of invitations say 15 in a given week per member people will be forced to hand select who gets an invitation.
Sheilah
I don't know how it is handled in social networking sites in general, but some combination of the below might work and reduces user experience.
Option 1:
Member can have the option to receive email invites from:
a. All members
b. Selected members probably from his/her contact groups, basically he/she knows the person
c. Never from blocked list
d. Never from any one.
The user can set this either at account creation time or later on; and can change his preference at anytime.
Option 2:
If the member has selected option a from above (receive invites from "All" members), then he/she will receive invites from any member. However the receiver has the option to mark the invite as spam, in turn mark the sender has spammer.
Here the member can have an option to add the sender to 'Blocked list' along with marking the invite as spam.
If the spam count for a member exceeds some system defined threshold (say 10 members say that person x is spamming or 10 members have added user x in the Blocked list), then block the member x from sending any invites, until he/she gives some reason why he/she thinks the invite is not a spam.
option 3:
If the member is a free registered member, he/she cannot send invite to more than predefined set of users (say 50 users) at a time.
If the member is a premium (fee based) member, then probably no restriction on the number of users to send.
Probably for a free registered members, if the spam record is good probably the restriction can be removed at some point in time (say after 6 months), but can be revoked in future if he/she starts sending spam.
All the above options are manual intervention from users, probably a tool that automatically detects spam will be a good one, but how and what criteria determines spam in general - number of users in the invitee list, objectionable word/language in the invite message or location/area (hmm not sure why though) from where it is send :)
Clarification added November 15, 2007:
I mean to say reduce user bad experience with the spam.
Get several ISPs and take the one that doesn't complain.
Hello Chin,
Hope you are having fun at the new venture.
One model is trusted tiers.
Every new user is at a low tier. Gets to send just X (small) no. of emails. After at least Y (say 2) people accept the invitations – then X is doubled. And so on. User moves from lower tier to higher tier.
Call / email me if you have more questions / want other more complex options
