The Help Center spam filter prevents new and edited end-user posts and comments that appear to be spam from being published to your help center. Suspicious content is sent to a spam queue where you can review and manage the content.
You must be a Guide admin to manage the spam queue.
Enabling the spam filter
The spam filter is enabled by default when you create your help center. The spam filter prevents new and edited end-user posts and comments that appear to be spam from being published to your help center.
You cannot disable the spam filter, but you can receive notifications when content is sent to the spam queue, and also manage the content that is sent to the spam queue, for example, by marking content as not spam.
Receiving notifications for content in the spam queue
You can subscribe to the spam queue so that you are alerted when there is content in the queue. The queue is checked every two hours, and if there is content in the queue, you will receive an email notification.
To receive notifications for the spam queue
- In Guide, click the Moderate Content () icon in the sidebar, then select Spam.
- Click Follow in the upper-right corner.
You will receive a notification if there is content in the spam queue when it is checked every two hours. You will also receive notifications for the content moderation queue, if it's enabled.
Managing your spam queue
From your spam queue, you can delete content, suspend the user, or mark content as not spam. You can bulk delete all the content in the spam queue at the same time if you want to.
If you don't take action on content in your spam queue, it is deleted after 30 days.
- In Guide, click the Moderate Content () icon in the sidebar, then select Spam.
- To take action on a post, select the check box next to it and click one of the following:
- Delete to permanently delete the post and remove it from your spam queue
- Not spam to publish the post
-
Suspend user to suspend the user and delete all of the user's posts
If you don't take action on content, it is automatically deleted after 30 days.
To manage user content in the content moderation queue, click User content, see Reviewing user content in the content moderation queue.
- In Guide, click the Moderate Content () icon in the sidebar, then select Spam.
- Click Delete all spam now.
Updating your custom theme to support the spam filter
If you're using a custom help center theme created before April 1, 2014, you need to add some extra styling to your stylesheet to support the spam filter.
- Article page
-
section
element with class"pending-comments-list"
-
span
element with class"pending-moderation-comment-badge"
-
- Question page
-
section
element with class"pending-answers-list"
-
span
element with class"pending-moderation-answer-badge"
-
.pending-moderation-comment-badge, .pending-moderation-answer-badge {
border-style: solid;
border-width: 1px;
border-color: #c7aa2b;
color: #c7aa2b;
padding: 3px5px;
margin-top: 10px;
font-size: 12px;
}
For detailed instructions, see the Customizing the CSS or JavaScript section in Customizing the help center.
16 comments
Patrick Morgan
We have an SSO setup with our product and, because we trust our users not to misbehave so much, I have content moderation turned off.
So I was surprised to learn that a couple comments/posts were marked as spam. A couple questions:
1) I have some ideas about why the posts in question were marked as such, but I'd love to know what criteria the filter uses to determine something is spam.
2) It looks like I "Follow" the Spam queue, but I received no indication that these posts were considered Spam. Bug? Or do I need to do something else to make sure I'm notified?
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Chad Mathis
A fellow Zendesk admin and I are also currently experiencing the @... described in their second point.
We also have content moderation off at the moment. My colleague and I both follow the spam queue in our Guide Admin. The most recent example of this happened this past Friday, though over the last month there have been a handful of others.
FWIW, we receive other Zendesk emails notifications without issue, such as updates to community threads we follow and daily suspended ticket notifications.
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Patrick Morgan
Tagging @... to get eyes on this. @..., this is exactly our issue. All our other email notifications are working fine—and I've quadruple checked my inbox rules to make sure they're not getting marked as spam (though I would appreciate that irony).
If it helps investigate, I can provide specific comments that were filtered as spam which I can't imagine why they were considered spam.
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Anna Roussanova
Hey Patrick and Chad, I wanted to let you know that I created a ticket for Patrick to look into this issue. I'll throw an update on here once I track down exactly what's going on.
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Anna Roussanova
Hi folks, I wanted to let you know that our developers figured out the problem with content moderation emails not being sent and fixed it. So you should start seeing those emails now.
1
Chad Mathis
That's great news! Thanks for the update, @....
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Jason K
Hi there,
I have a similar experience as @.... I'll echo the same questions here:
Specifically, because I had a team member in support reach out saying that an end user had been posting for the past week and eventually noticed her posts weren't showing up in the community. After the support person reached out I took a look in the Spam filter and low and behold, it was there - along with other content. We recently started a contest encouraging end users to post in the community and we have had an influx of posts coming in. This is the only thing I can think of that would trigger the filter but again, I'm not quite sure why.
I'll have to wait to see if I start getting them now based on @...'s news.
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DesignSpark DC
I have a user that kept getting flagged for SPAM content even though he is one of the starts of our forum. As we have zero control over the spam filtering, I can't even turn it off, he was getting really frustrated and I was getting frustrated with the lack of control of the platform settings
Eventually he found out that he was only triggered for spam whilst using a VPN.
I'm not sure why this would be or why even after marking al this users content as NOT SPAM his content continued to be sent to the Spam bucket for moderation
I know more and more users will be utilising a VPN and I don't want this to escalate further in the future, can we have some control over our users Spam filtering?
1
Cheeny Aban
Hi Davecole,
Do you still have some ticket examples from the last thirty days? if yes, our Experts might be able to check them for you. I suggest that you contact our support, you can contact us here
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Ole Dyring
We have users posting in our community in multiple languages. Posts in English goes through smoothly, while posts in e.g. Danish is regularly, but unnecessarily, blocked by the spam filter.
I would definitely like some more options for tuning the spam filter: Better language algorithms, option to 'white-list' specific users.
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Lyndee
a little over a week ago, we began noticing spam arriving to our Inboxes. we have been going in and marking them as Spam (individually), but some of them contain lewd photos, which is very troublesome. nothing has changed on our end and i would love to figure out how to make sure these are actually caught as Spam before arriving to our unassigned queues. any helpful tips or tricks?
1
Cheeny Aban
I created a ticket for your inquiry to further investigate. I look forward to your reply!
0
Kiki Novitasari
Hi,
I have a client that uses our app to send emails to recipient.
Every email sent will go to zendesk too.
But, lately these emails have been caught in spam by Zendesk.
Even though it has been marked as not spam on Zendesk, every email sent will go to the spam section on Zendesk.
Can the Zendesk filter mark if each email sent from our application is not spam?
Thank you.
0
Christine
Depending on the suspension reason, we have outlined suggestions on how to avoid and resolve ticket suspension in our articles here: Causes for ticket suspension and Understanding and managing suspended tickets and spam
We'll look into the issue in more detail in the support ticket you raise with our team. Kindly respond to the ticket with the information needed so we can investigate from there. We'll wait for your response. Thank you!
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Christopher Billman
Currently our forums require a log in to view and post. Therefore, everyone must be a registered user before they can comment on forums. By doing this, we don't get SPAM comments on our site, yet the SPAM filter regularly marks perfectly valid comments as SPAM and I regularly mark them as not SPAM but the SPAM filter never learns and apparently there is no way to deactivate the filter. Any suggestions on how to fix this? The SPAM filter has never once caught a SPAM comment.
0
Dainne Kiara Lucena-Laxamana
Hi Christopher Billman !
I went a head & created a ticket on your behalf to look into this further. Please keep an eye out for our Email
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