Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
A public help centre attracts spam wherever anybody can post. The largest defence is already in place, and the rest is a set of choices.
Where it arrives
- Article comments.
- Community posts, if you have one.
- The request form, which becomes suspended tickets.
Commenting already requires an account
This is not a decision you make. To comment or post in a help centre, an end user has to sign in, which means creating an account first. Automated spam does not do that, so the largest single defence is already in place before you configure anything.
The choice that does exist is on the request form, through Anybody can submit tickets. Leave it off and submitting a ticket needs an account too. Turn it on and anyone may submit, but a CAPTCHA is then enforced automatically, so the form is not left open.
What else is available
- A built-in spam filter, which holds suspected posts and comments in a spam queue rather than publishing them.
- Word moderation, which sends only content containing words you specify to a moderation queue. On the Enterprise plans.
- Full moderation, where every new and edited end-user post and comment waits for a Knowledge admin. Effective and it needs somebody.
- Rate limiting, IP blocking and a domain blocklist, for the cases where spam has a shape you can name.
Subscribe to the queues rather than remembering to look. The spam queue is checked every two hours and emails you when something is waiting.
Mark as spam rather than reject
Rejecting a post deletes it. Marking it as spam moves it to your spam queue instead, where you can still look at it, and it costs the same click. On a queue you are moderating quickly, that difference is the one that lets you undo a mistake.
Comments you do not need
Article comments are optional, per article or across the help centre. On a knowledge base where comments generate spam and little else, turning them off is a legitimate answer rather than an admission of defeat.
Feedback through voting and through the ticket channel usually tells you more anyway.
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