I'm against this Idea. Why? For a couple of reasons:

1. Current spam filtering sucks. The MVP forum moderators have repeatedly asked OutSystems to improve this, and they have promised to do so, but currently there's still little progress. But regardless, a reporting button is a bandaid for a failing spam filter. OS should put it's effort in fixing the detection of spam, not in creating buttons.
2. Moderators like me are volunteers. We monitor the forum, and when we see spam we delete it. A typical spam post is only on-line for an hour or so. When we're not watching the forum, we are doing out day job, the one that gets us money (instead of useless OS street cred :)). If I'm in a meeting, and I'd get some signal there's spam on the forum, I'm not going to drop everything and remove it. I wait until I'm out of that meeting. But I would check the forum anyways in between tasks, so the signalling is of no use.

What you can do if you see spam is simple: ignore it. Do not dislike, do not reply, definitely don't quote the URL in some other post or Idea, as the deleted posts will be accesible via a direct link. The moderators will typically look first at posts that haven't been replied to, and spam posts are easy enough to detect, and to remove. Thanks for your co-operation!

The report spam button is a basic tool of any forum software out there. There's no good reason to not have it. 

With all due respect Kilian I'm looking at the forums right now and top 6 unanswered questions are spam, 5 of them were posted more than 1 hours ago (and it's 11 am on a working day, so it's not like a 5 am Sunday occurrence).

I understand you volunteer for moderation, and as everyone here we thank you for your time and effort, but perhaps that's just the problem and OutSystems has enough revenue as it is to get a dedicated forum admin, I reckon. Maybe they'd be the one getting those report notifications.

Yes, thank you Kilian and all you other moderators, we very much appreciate you! =) And I'm surprised there is no paid admin as Mariano mentioned.

However, I think it would still be helpful to have a report button, but the button text could change from 'report' to 'already reported' and become disabled as soon as someone has reported them.

That way, there is no need for people to post/comment about spam posts repeatedly, nor report them repeatedly, as people can see it's already been reported.  This would save the moderators from being bombarded with repeat notifications for the same thing.

And it would make sense to have the button for both spam posts and also any inappropriate comments.

This is very much needed option because spam posts are increasing on our community

Shailesh,

I'd be very interested to know where you've seen this increase, as OutSystems has released a new spam detection recently (about two weeks ago), and since then, I don't think there has been much uncaught spam, if any.

Also, see my reply here as to why I think this would be a bad idea.

Maybe a year ago this was an issue, but no longer, since OutSystems has included spam detection.

So I don't think this is a very needed option, there is barely spam that slips through. Most of it is caught by spam detection, and the once that are unclear are validated by moderators.

Hey Bas, thank you for the idea.



We have implemented an automated detection spam mechanism in the beginning of this year. With this model in place, we don't have the need for manual spam validation.

Because of this, we don’t have plans to implement this.

Thank you again, and keep the ideas coming!