Stop comment/refer spam

Envato Authors CodeCanyon
1

Do we have any success story about authors who stopped comment/refer spam on their items? It drives me crazy…

Here’s the latest example: released a new [link removed by mod - self promotion not allowed in the forums]. Now, if you check the Comments tab, you will see spam comments like “GLWS!”, “Great Work, Congratulations GLWS” and similar.

Why these comments are spam?

  1. They only contain a few words and are not related to item at all.
  2. They do not add any value to Envato marketplace. They have no value or useful information for potential buyers and/or existing clients.
  3. They are nothing but a mass “copy/paste” attempt. If you visit https://codecanyon.net/category/all and go to Comments tab of any item, you will see the same persons posted exactly the same irrelevant comments under every single item on Envato marketplace! You are not an idiot to believe they honestly think every single item in the world is “great work”, right?

Hence, it’s nothing but a pure spam and attempt to get an extra link to their profile, also known as refer spam.

I know I can manually report every single comment to Envato and they might remove it, but is it really the only way to go? Is such activity really OK with Envato terms?

4 Likes
2

Not only for CC, for TF, there’re few authors who do the same

1 Like
3

Just checked some random themes. Yes, they have spam comments and guess what… they are posted exactly by the same authors who spam on CodeCanyon.

Could someone from Envato provide any feedback on this? Because it affects Envato marketplace directly. And affects in in a very negative way because whole market looks like a spam farm, where users need to scroll trough spam comments if they want to fins some useful questions/comments.

4

Just read Envato acceptable use policy several times, and I think this one might apply:

Unacceptable content or links which might cause harm to the Envato products or services or brand or others is definitely NOT OKAY with us.

And this is exactly what these low-reputation authors do: they convert product pages (that belong to other authors) into spam farms to get links to their own products.

5

Contacted support, this is their response:

Thanks for raising this.

Back in the early days many of these comments were genuine when the author community was very small but now, they have developed into spam - and a poor attempt at marketing as well.

Right now, the way to deal with these is to flag them, the community team will then remove these.

We are working through a list of changes we want to deploy and tackling this is also one of them.

So at least Envato also believes it’s not okay to spam other authors…

2 Likes