Discussion Groups: Moderator features

As soon as you open a discussion group to the public you're likely to see two things:

• Spam. Spammers are getting good at posting advertisements and other spam to public discussion groups as soon as they find them, even rarely used discussion groups on quiet corners of the Internet with no visitors. They often try to post URLs to their own web site in hopes of improving the Google PageRank™ of those URLs.
• General abuse, ranging from personal abuse to copyright violations to merely off-topic posts.

Everyone who is logged onto FogBugz as an administrator, or who has been set up as an administrator of a particular discussion group, will be able to moderate, removing abusive posts and spam. Over time, as you moderate groups manually, FogBugz AutoSort will learn from your moderation and try to mimic what you did. For example, if it sees that you keep deleting posts from a certain IP address, or posts containing a certain word, it will learn to delete those automatically. That way the post is deleted before it even appears.

FogBugz AutoSort is not 100% reliable, and sometimes it will be suspicious about a post but not certain that it needs to be deleted. In this case it will merely hold it for approval. A post which is held for approval will not appear to the outside world until a moderator clears it.

Note: FogBugz AutoSort can be turned on or off for each discussion group. By default, it is on.

Whenever a post has been deleted, the original person who made that post will still see it if they log on from the same IP address or the same web browser. This technique helps reduce the number of people who become furious at having their precious post deleted and try to disrupt the discussion group in other ways.

As the moderator deletes posts, undeletes posts, and approves posts which were held for approval, FogBugz AutoSort will learn from those actions. Over time, it will become more adept at recognizing the signs of bad posts.

FogBugz uses the following tactics, among others, to prevent spam:

• It does not allow Google or other search engine spiders to follow links in the discussion group to outside URLs, so posting an outside URL will not increase the Google PageRank of that URL.
• It does not allow new replies to topics which have already scrolled off the home page, so spammers cannot hide spam in old messages which the moderator is unlikely to see.
• It uses FogBugz AutoSort, the same extremely effective spam filtering technology used for removing spam from incoming email.
• It prevents users from finding out that their message was blocked or deleted. If spammers notice their spam is being blocked, they will try to work around the block and try to repost their spam using different words. However since FogBugz continues to show even deleted messages to the IP address range of the person (if spammers are people) who posted it, it's very hard for spammers to even find out that their spam is being removed.

Read our advice on successful moderation.