How to reduce spam?

Support / Post a Wanted / March 10, 2018

Some tips

Unfortunately it's difficult to prevent spam entirely, however there are a few tricks we have seen that users can do to quickly sort out serious replies from spammy copy and paste replies.

Make a specific request

Ask for a specific piece of information to be included in the response. An example might be request a link to their portfolio, or request that they must state what time zone they are in their reply. Although this tip doesn't reduce spam it helps to quickly determine who took the time to read your wanted and provided a serious reply.

We have even seen some wanteds with the instruction to simply some random word at the top of their reply - like 'YELLOW'.

Address verify

Selecting the preference of Address Verified users also reduces spam replies. Although everyone can reply, we do measure a reduction in spam replies when this option is selected. It also encourages replies from our more professional users - which typically results in a better match.

Proactive spam filters 

We run filters to catch situations where a user copy and pastes the same reply to multiple wanteds repeatedly. If we detect an abusive pattern we simply prevent the delivery of the replies and place a watch on the user's future replies.