We “banned and purged” roughly 2550[1] pretty straightforwardly spam users from the Forum in 2022. These are accounts that join with names that range from “Bob” to “TAXI-Vienna-CALL-7777777777” and try to post spam content on the Forum. I’d guess that most of these were purged around when they were trying to join, but we also went on some “cleaning sprees” last year (I think around the time when we were adding some community features and spam profiles were suddenly showing up).
This is mostly run by (awesome) contractors — the Forum facilitators. Facilitators also approve new legit users and organize/tag new posts, so I’m not sure exactly how much time goes into dealing with trolls and spam. I’d very tentatively guess that it’s probably between 0.5 and 2 hours per week, across the different people, but I’ve not worked directly on this in a while and I don’t know what takes what amount of time. (We have a pretty good system for processing new users, so this usually goes fast, but there’s the occasional tricky troll/spam user that takes more time.)
This has also been getting more difficult because some spam accounts now seem to use AI text generators, so it’s less immediately clear that something is not a genuine comment. (Although in the past, they’d also do stuff like copy someone else’s comment and then insert a link at the bottom. I don’t know how this will progress.) We’ll hopefully be improving policies/processes around that in the near future.
We haven’t had that many people looking for Electronic Arts forum, although we’ve had a couple. I don’t think this takes us any significant amount of time — probably less than an hour this year?
Adding a bit of info:
We “banned and purged” roughly 2550[1] pretty straightforwardly spam users from the Forum in 2022. These are accounts that join with names that range from “Bob” to “TAXI-Vienna-CALL-7777777777” and try to post spam content on the Forum. I’d guess that most of these were purged around when they were trying to join, but we also went on some “cleaning sprees” last year (I think around the time when we were adding some community features and spam profiles were suddenly showing up).
This is mostly run by (awesome) contractors — the Forum facilitators. Facilitators also approve new legit users and organize/tag new posts, so I’m not sure exactly how much time goes into dealing with trolls and spam. I’d very tentatively guess that it’s probably between 0.5 and 2 hours per week, across the different people, but I’ve not worked directly on this in a while and I don’t know what takes what amount of time. (We have a pretty good system for processing new users, so this usually goes fast, but there’s the occasional tricky troll/spam user that takes more time.)
This has also been getting more difficult because some spam accounts now seem to use AI text generators, so it’s less immediately clear that something is not a genuine comment. (Although in the past, they’d also do stuff like copy someone else’s comment and then insert a link at the bottom. I don’t know how this will progress.) We’ll hopefully be improving policies/processes around that in the near future.
We haven’t had that many people looking for Electronic Arts forum, although we’ve had a couple. I don’t think this takes us any significant amount of time — probably less than an hour this year?
It was around 806 users in 2021.