Lessons learned building an online community: PART 1 — Spammers
This blog series will try to shed some light on how we have dealt with issues that appeared the past year during the building of techlondon.io , a community for the London startup ecosystem, on Slack.
As Slack grew popular in the workplace and more people started realising they could launch multiple Slack networks at once, people envisioned it was possible to build and run communities around topics of interest.
This is how the idea of techlondon.io started — pretty much like all the other community networks, built around a common passion, the London startup ecosystem. As we know, not all stories are easy, downhill, effortless rides… and neither was this one
Jonathan B. Strong — the entrepreneur/podcaster who initially started and built the community, handpicked a few trusted contributors from the small initial crowd to form an admin team.
As communities grow larger, not only they require an additional pair of eyes and hands, they also become more “needy”: the workload intensifies and requires individuals leading them to shift from part-time project maintainers to fully dedicated members, a soulwrecking experience for a single person to manage.
One of the strongest advantages of building a “geo-online community” means that it’s really possible to make things happen: Numerous times members of techlondon were able to bond online and following that, meet for a “real-life” catch up in the busy city of London. Thinking of it, these events happened only after meeting casually online, maybe because of a conversation sparked on techlondon or a warm introduction from a commond friend through Slack, is heartwarming.
A few people also managed to find permanent/freelance work this way.
Countless possibilities.
Awareness of the tech community around oneself and community spirit are direct results of this project and make our network such a powerful tool.
The *not so silver* lining
However, as the group grew larger (currently over 2000 members but that’s just a vanity metric) we encountered a pretty annoying issue. Probably the biggest issue after, moderating and keeping the discussions going: SPAMMERS.
As we all know it by now, the team directories are publicly available on Slack, meaning anyone signed up to the network can “find” email addresses of the other members, which leads to sending marketing and unsolicited emails.
And so, as great things reach their peak, greedy humans start finding ways to ruin things…
Example
Identifying spammers isn’t easy — it requires a lot of double checking and cross checking. Most importantly unlike the gentleman mentioned in his email — good things don’t happen to those who hustle this way.
If you weren’t aware, sending unsolicited emails is against the law.
So we created a spammer database…
- We get public and private reports from members of the community that inform us that a particular person might have mass-mailed the whole directory. We take this very seriously and created a big spreadsheet with all the names and email addresses of those who have performed such a thing.
- After contacting the offender, we proceed to limit their access to our network. The violation of the community code of conduct is mentioned (which is to be taken very seriously at all times).
- We circulate this spreadsheet with trusted admins from other Slack networks around the world to enable collaboration.
The end goal is simple: Identify who is being naughty.
Is that going to solve the problem? What can I do to protect myself?
A) Nowadays you can create a catch all email address so that when you signup for a service you use the name of the service “@yoursite.com”.
Let’s assume you’re signing up to twitter, use the following:
- twitter@yoursite.com
This way you’ll know that if anyone contacts you and they email twitter@yoursite.com — means they’ve somehow accessed twitter’s database to retrieve your email. In our scenario signing up for techlondon would be done using techlondon@yoursite.com — be re-assured that if you receive any weird marketing email using that address it probably means someone has been harvesting emails.
B) Create a throw away email: Everyone has an old “hotmail” or “yahoo” email address that have been un-used for serious stuff for years and are just accumulating tons of marketing emails. Sure that’s a good idea but what about notifications you care about? What about when you get a private message or if you set-up highlights on particular keywords?
C) Ignore. Just delete the spam and unwanted email and get on with your life.
D) Wait for slack to “fix” their product and add a way to hide email addresses from display. (N.B This is more of an “add the functionality” rather than “fixing an issue”. Slack wasn’t ideally created for building communities but to enable better communication within teams)
Finally
We can’t really publish the name of the spammers publicly, because that could lead to bigger legal trouble. We can only share them in private with other administrators.
But again what is stopping me from complaining about behaviours like the ones depicted above on Twitter / ProductHunt. We do have pressing evidence and witnesses/victims of these rude, illegal (in some countries) and unproductive methods for spamming us!
Being cheeky and naughty won’t help, your days are numbered, spammers…beware of your and your brand’s reputation!
