Spam is a problem we all generally deal with in day-to-day life. Snail mail, email, cold calls, or street canvassing, it can all get a bit annoying. Doing business online brings with it the inherent risk of being the target of online spam, and when you have a public space online for your customers to converse, that risk becomes greater.
This article outlines the tools available to you, and how you can use utilize them to fight spam in your help center. All of these tools are available to all plans, with the exception of word moderation.
This article contains the following topics:
Spam filter for preventing and managing spam
Your help center has a built-in spam filter. The spam filter prevents new and edited end-user posts and comments that appear to be spam from being published to your help center. For information about the spam filter and how to manage your spam queue, see Using the spam filter to prevent spam in your help center.
Word moderation for content that contains specific words
Guide admins can choose to filter content based on specific that will trigger content moderation. When this option is enabled, end-user content that contains any of the words indicated in your list, is placed in a moderation queue instead of being posted publicly. You can then moderate the content and decide if it is spam or if it's safe to post in your help center. You can subscribe to the moderation queue so that you are alerted when there are posts in the queue. Learn more.
Rate limiting for new content
Your help center limits the number of new posts and comments a single user can create within a 24 hour period. By researching usage patterns we’ve created rate limits that don’t affect normal use, but target spammers. While rate limiting new content itself doesn't block spam, it does help reduce it.
Blocking IP addresses of known spammers
Your help center actively detects and blocks the IP addresses you've received the most identified spam from, so that they can no longer access Zendesk accounts.
CAPTCHA
To make comments on your help center end users must sign in, which means creating an account first. End users of all Zendesk Support customers who activated the help center will experience Cloudflare's CAPTCHA when signing up.
Blocklist for identified spam domains
If you can identify patterns, email addresses, or domains in spam users, you can add them to the Blocklist section of Customer Admin settings. Learn more
Subscribe for notification of new content
Make sure you subscribe to the sections in your Knowledge base and the topics in your Community so that you receive email notifications when new posts and comments are created. Not only will you see what your customers are asking, but you'll also catch spam early so that you can quickly remove it and suspend the user. Learn more.