Warning users not to share credentials with untrusted members?

Community
1

Hello,

We have a large discourse forum and the discussions are mostly about development of websites. We had cases that users were abused for sharing their website credentials to untrusted members.

It would be great to add a warning message were users can clearly see it before initiating a private message to another member. This will definitely help to reduce such incidents.

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2

I suggest editing the “Start a Message” copy in Admin, Customize, Text.

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3

When is it appropriate to share these credentials? Who is “untrusted” and who is trusted?

4

Hey Jeff,

Thanks for your reply.
The thing is that, the warning message is long and it gets out of the frame.

5

Hey Jay,

Well, in fact it isn’t appropriate to share credentials at all. Maybe I put it wrong in my initial topic. I just want to let the users know that they are on their own when it comes to such approaches. We have a freelancer section on the forum where people can request for certain jobs to be done.

Just like marketplace section here on Meta.

6

You may also need to modify your local CSS in Admin, Customize to make room for the text.

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7

Right. It’s a bad idea to share credentials in netherworld. So (in addition to Jeff’s suggestions) maybe something could go in some pinned topic about basic common sense stuff. Or perhaps you could have a group of trusted consultants or something.

And conversely, you’d want to try to rid your community of Bad People. (When you figure that out you can move on to world peace.)

(And now that I think about it, it’s often appropriate for people to share credentials with me, but sometimes people share credentials when it’s unnecessary, but I digress.)

2 Likes
8

Agree with this.
You can put something like this:
“Start a Message and be aware rules, avoid be banned!” or something like that.

AND, with the “forum rules” you must advice to your community that your system (the forum) can search into user’s PM for spam and websites credentials. Thus, users who are detected who are sending unsolicited information will be banned from the community automatically.

This is possible using this query via Data Explorer.
Of course, the ban will not be automatic, the staff will have to review the results of the query, and take the desired action with the user.

Good luck!

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