A New Way To Fight Community Spam?

Whether its inside email, blogger comments, or Orkut scrapbooks, spam is really annoying. While their is currently no effective way to fight scrapbook spam, Sharath has developed a way for community owners to fight forum spam, which in the case for Orkut, can make or break a community.

Here are the details of how this hack works from his site (note: this requires Firefox and GreaseMonkey):

To use this script, simply go to your community, and click on "view all topics" button. It will start searching for spam messages and prompt you to delete if it finds any. For a shortcut, just enter: http://www.orkut.com/CommTopics.aspx?cmm=xxxx
Replace xxxx with your community ID.

Above you can see an example of confirmation message given to delete after detecting a spam message.

I tested this on the small forums that I owned, although no spam came up (probably because I deleted them recently before installing this hack). You can download this hack over here (GreaseMonkey and Firefox required) and if you have any questions, comments or words of praise you can reach Sharath on his blog.

I am going to recommend this to the Community Owners forum (as well as several others) and see what their opinion is of this tool (and how effective it is within their forums).

I wonder if something similar could be made for our scrapbooks?

Note: I am going to add this hack underneath Orkut User Tools underneath the sidebar.

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