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Many apps nowadays use phone numbers for verifying new accounts. Obviously, it is far from impossible for a malicious user to get a new phone number if they car
by avolcano 6y ago
Many apps nowadays use phone numbers for verifying new accounts. Obviously, it is far from impossible for a malicious user to get a new phone number if they care enough, but it does usually have a monetary cost, which will keep a significant portion of malicious users out. This also can help prevent some forms of fraud.
This is somewhat obvious, but take care in designing social interactions on your app, and introduce easy reporting systems and user-controlled blocking systems (e.g., even if you don't respond to a user's report in a timely manner, a user should still be able to block communications from another user using a button in the app). You may want to allow users to choose to only allow messages from users who have been on the site for a certain amount of time, or have some kind of additional level of verification. Also consider introducing active, paid moderators who actively respond to reports as they come in, if your budget allows.
Allowing users access to open text fields on the internet is inherently dangerous. I have tried to avoid it in all of my apps (for example, I've made games that use randomly-generated user names rather than allow users to input their own, and I only added user comments to an app I was building _after_ I'd built a user reporting system and ensured I got an immediate alert on my phone if a user sent a report). It is your responsibility to try to design your app, and moderate your community, to mitigate these risks.
- pldr1234 6y agoThis is the correct answer. User-controlled blocking systems will work well.
- nailer 6y ago> a user should still be able to block communications from another user using a button in the app Adding to this - when you do act, your ban should be that all users are effectively blocking this user, ie a shadow ban. That way the bad user, to themselves, still seems to be interacting with the site, just nobody else seems to care.
- zaksingh 6y agoOne nice moderation trick I've done for my company is building a slack integration that posts new reports into a dedicated channel, each of which has a "ban user" button. This way onboarding new moderators is as simple as adding them to the channel, and you automatically get push notifications and access from all of your devices with configurable controls (i.e. you can mute the channel when you're busy w/o having to build this functionality yourself). We do the same for moderating user photos (they get posted into slack with a "remove" button) as well as for other moderation features. I highly recommend this approach for when the volume of reports is manageable.
- bradknowles 6y agoThe “burner” app makes it trivially easy to get a new phone number. Many other apps do the same. That’s not really a barrier for anyone who cares to give a moments thought to how they can get around that limitation.