Agile India.

Over the last few months we have seen a huge increase in members announcing events as discussion on the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group. I think this is a good thing, but Diana and I, as the moderators of this group, have some concerns.

• There is too much noise about event announcements.
• We don’t see why they need to be discussions. There is nothing to discuss about an event announcement. We feel it would be better to add it under News. (I wish LinkedIn would create a new tab called Events. Then folks can publish their events there. For now please use the News.)
• There are some community run, non-profit events, which we know are really helpful for the community. And we want to promote them. So as moderators, we will make them as featured discussion/news.
• There are lots of company run webinars/seminars. Sometimes, we are not sure if they are real events that help the community or are more of marketing gimmicks. We hope our members are smart enough to weed the noise out. So for now we’ll not really do much about it. Except that we’ll request members to avoid using this forum for such marketing events. Also if you notice such posts, please comment on it. This would create bad reputation for the companies and hopefully members will stop misusing this forum.

I’m a strong believer in Distributed Cognition and the Broken-Window-Syndrome. If I see a lot of marketing posting in a forum, I would be encouraged to add more marketing posts or I’ll leave this forum coz there is too much noise. But if we maintain our discussions clean, spammers will be strongly discouraged to add noise.

Also as members of this community we can help. We can comments and discourage spammers. As moderators, Diana and I, delete any such posts whenever we find them. If the post is quite offensive, in the past, I’ve even banned members.

Some more thoughts on, as user group moderators how to keep the spammers out.

I hope this will help us keep this forum clean.

If you have other ideas or want to comment about this approach, please leave your valuable comments below.

Most User Group moderators will agree with me that keeping the spammers out of your mailing list is a big pain. Different groups have different definition for spammers. For me, recruiters, marketing folks and people interested in self-promotion are also part of the general spammers.

Some of the main groups I moderate are:

• Agile India on Yahoo Groups
  
• Agile Philly on Yahoo Groups
  
• Agile Alliance on LinkedIn
• Agile Coaches on Yahoo Groups

For different groups I’ve used different tactics to keep the spammers out.

For example, for Agile India and Agile Philly, first post by any new member is moderated. Once approved the person can make further posts without any moderation. If you have a lot of new members (mostly valid members), its gets quite time consuming to moderate the list. It also discourages new members from posting on the list.

For the Agile Coaches, we use the list only for announcements by the moderators. Members are not allowed to post to the group. Instead they post it to the moderators and the moderators in-turn post it to the group. Alternatively the members can use the wiki to start discussion there. Which is what we want to encourage.

The Agile Alliance list on LinkedIn is very interested for me. LinkedIn does not provide any pre-post moderation and it also allows all users to post to the list. So what I end up doing is, I scan the discussion board every 2-3 days and see if there are any posts which are spams. I go ahead and delete them. Earlier I used to send an email to the person who posted it, saying I’m deleting this message because our group treats this as spam. But it turned out to be too much work. So now I just go ahead and delete the message.

This leads to a very interesting phenomenon. If I’m a human spammer and see a discussion forum where there are no spams, I’m afraid to post any spam messages. It discourages the spammer. Its like the broken window syndrome. If you see a house with broken windows, you don’t mind throwing another stone at it. But if you see a clean house with everything intact, you are generally scared to damage the building.

Every now and then I do get a spam, but its quite manageable.