Many Creators have noticed an increase in spam in the last couple of weeks on their Ning Networks. Starting around President’s day weekend we saw an increase in the amount of spam reported, reflecting an industry-wide increase, particularly from Canadian pharmaceutical companies.

What are we doing about it and how can you help?

We are aware of this issue and have been working hard to provide short term fixes for this increase and long term solutions to harden the platform against these trends. A lot of our work is in the background and not directly visible to Network Creators or Members.

That said, here is a run down of some of the features that you may see:

• We continue to tighten and refine our rules for identifying and removing spam accounts automatically, which you should see as a decrease in unwanted activity.
  

• We recently released the “suspend for spam” feature. We are now using this data to automatically disable accounts and analyzing it to help improve our ability to spot and remove these accounts more quickly.
  

• Last week, we introduced a Captcha feature for Ning Networks who do not use member moderation.
  

• We are working on a feature that will allow Members designated by the Creator to flag content and hide it from view...more details to follow.
  

We’re very aware of how spam affects Ning Networks and we are working hard behind the scenes to tackle this issue. In the next few weeks and months you should see significant improvements in our ability to block spammers before they hit your Ning Networks as well as new tools to help you manage unwanted content on your Ning Networks.

Martin Westhead (Martin runs the Spam and Abuse Prevention team at Ning).