Spam

This articles explains how spam works in Tender and gives step to improve your experience and decrease false positives.

Settings

Spam related settings can be found at [yourtender].tenderapp.com/settings

Email spam protection: all incoming emails are checked for spam, but the threshold is extremely high. No false positive should ever occur because of it. If you check this box, we simply lower that threshold to the normal level for your site.

Web spam protection: this setting allows you to choose between 3 different options:

• Brain Busters: this is the simplest captcha and the one usually preferred by users. It asks simple text questions that are easy for humans, but difficult for bots.

• ReCAPTCHA: this uses the popular reCAPTCHA service offered by Google. It is widely used on the web and has a good track record of stopping bots, but it can be difficult for humans.

• None: No captcha.

Enabling any of the captcha options will turn on our content-based spam check for web-form submitted discussions. What this means is that if you choose a captcha, then web submissions will be checked for spam using our internal system which scores based on common spam keywords and other content-based detection mechanisms.

If you choose "None", you will get no captcha AND no spam check. We might change this in the future and make those settings separate, but for now this is how it works.

False positives

Checking for spam is a difficult task. No matter how good the spam engine is, from time to time some legitimate comments will be wrongly marked as spam. For this reason, you should regularly check your spam folder. Even Gmail, which has one of the best spam engine in the world, occasionally marks good messages as spam, and so checking your spam folder is a good habit.

That being said, false positives should still be the exception, not the rule. Tender learns from your action, so when you mark comments as spam or when you restore comments from the spam folder, Tender learns from the content of those messages. So the first thing you can do if you have a lot of false positives is: restore them.

I'm still getting false positives, what should I do?

Well, it depends how many: if it's one or two every few days, this is still in the range of "normal". As explained before, no spam engine is perfect, and there will be mistakes from time to time. Just keep restoring those.

If you receive more than a handful a week, that's a bit much and you should:

• Leave the false positives in your spam folder, don't restore them.
• Contact us, we will take a look at those messages and see if can improve the situation for you.

Questions?

Still have questions about spam, let us know and we'll try to answer them in this article.