April 19 - Email Verification & Forum Participation
THID UPDATE IS NOW LIVE!
Hi team,
We know that there has been a surge in forum spam. We are very sorry about that! About 2 weeks ago, we launched the ability verify your email as a member. We are now working on the next phase of this update, which would be to make it compulsary to to verify your email prior to posting on the forums for the first time. Our hope is that this will help reduce spam.
The date of this update is still TBA. But it is in development and we are working building this functionality as we speak. I wanted to give you this update to let you know, we hear you and we are actively working to get a solution in place.
Thank you for your patience! Please subscribe to this thread if you would like to follow this update. I will post information here as I have it.
This Update is NOW LIVE!
How do I verify my email?
@imadoglover This is something that is being done with member accounts. I thought listener accounts were already verified, but I could be wrong.
@imadoglover
@AffyAvo is correct. Listener accounts must be verified prior to doing anything ^^ Existing members will see a banner encouraging them to verify, and new members will be prompted upon creating their account :)
@MonBon
I can't see anything prompting me to verify my email... where should it be?
@PatheticAmI
There's a picture on this thread, but there will be a yellow banner on top of the site prompting you to verify.
@MonBon
I can't see the banner, and the image is not showing up. I think my computer is just messing up, it does that occasionally. Thanks for the help, though!
Will this put an end to trollers?
@futureDavidblue98
I don't think it will be the end - legitimate people can engage in "trolling" activities. We are hoping this along with other future measures will help prevent the automated spam accounts and posts though.
Hello! Can someone please advise. How do I verify my email? I cant seem to find how to do it? Can I do it in the app or does it have to be done in the full website? Many thanks
@Rea100
New accounts can do it through their email, but since this wasn't implemented until April 6th accounts created before that will have to do it manually. A yellow banner will appear on the website prompting you to do so. An email will then be sent to your email and you can verify from there.
@MonBon Many thanks for this! I will wait for the prompt!
@Laura
even for members that are already on 7 cups before April??? I mean is verification compulsory for everyone
@CallMeNaman2002
Existing members are not required to verify their email as of now (for instance you could post this!) but they are encouraged to.
When I switched to my member account (created about 2 years ago), 7 Cups would not let me reply here until I verified.
I pressed the button "Send Verification Email" and it said, "Email verification sent. Check your email and follow the verification link."
No verification e-mail ever arrived. I have reported this problem before, but it hasn't been fixed yet.
Then I changed my e-mail address to a fake address and tried again. This time I got an e-mail at the fake address saying "Thank you for joining the 7 Cups community!!" even though I joined 2 years ago. I pressed the button and "verified" the fake address.
Seems to me some wrinkles are yet to be ironed out.
@MonBon
Oh, and when I checked the New Threads view of the forums just now, my spam blocker told me it had blocked 7 of the 20 threads, which 7 Cups had let through.
@RarelyCharlie
@RarelyCharlie
Wrinkles are to be expected, thanks so much for pointing them out!
And re: spam, yes, we are still working on it. As I'm not personally on the dev team I'm unsure what the next steps are, but I've been letting them know of the general situation. Your observations are helpful :)
@RarelyCharlie - email delivery can be a problem for sure, what with all the message and notification emails we are prone to send out.
You are savvy so I assume the email was not in any spam buffer you have access to. When that happens the deliverability issue tends to be one of two things: (1) your email provider has decided to give our email sending address a low "trust" score (influenced by many signals but most likely people putting messages in spam or at best not opening them), or (2) an intermediary such as Google has throttled our email volume that they're willing to carry per day.
In the latter case I believe we (or SMTP) would try to keep sending and eventually get through so sadly it is more likely to be case 1. :(
My theory is that it's not either of those. When I clicked a therapy ad once (on my member account) 7 Cups started sending me spam. To stop the spam I unsubscribed from (I think) MailChimp. If the verifications are going via MailChimp, or whatever it's called, that could explain why they don't reach that address.
It's somewhat academic, because the forum spammers and the chatroom trolls, like me, have access to unlimited quantities of fake e-mail addresses. 7 Cups is using a simple click verification that barely slows them down.
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
@RarelyCharlie - not mailchimp but unsubscribing from messages would tend to prevent the sending of messages for sure.
I can look into whether the email verification "respects" the please-don't-send-me-email settings or if they need to be reconciled somehow (cc @devTeam).
Your wisdom on the neverending social media battle vs. spam is always welcome, whatever tone you share it with. :)
A pal of mine whose social media moderation / anti-spam sofware was bought by one the large internet behemoths was kind enough to give me some time a while back to check our toolkit against the state of the art. He emphasized that the biggest lever, particualrly regarding commerical (vs. say, griefing-type) spam, is to raise the cost of making an account. Not to get too far into the weeds but throwaway emails are cheaper but over time can be blacklisted or not-whitelisted, for example, and gmail accounts are more expensive than say yahoo accounts (not that we would require google accounts to connect to us, but this is just an exampe of the leverage as this one acquaintance of mine communicated it to me).
I prefer to remain somewhat circumspect about what we can do, what we are doing, what we would like to do, what we know we are not doing as well as we wish, etc., for reasons, but I will never refuse to read and consider advice so keep those barbs coming! <3
@MonBon how do we verify if we don't get an email or prompt for this?
@inventiveHouse2965
I would suggest emailing info@7cups.com
This should be mostly unnecessary, there are not current plans to require verification for older member accounts (although some bugs have been noted as above)
@Laura I'm not seeing the prompt and i haven't gotten an email... but i also don't have a profile pic uploaded... Is there a way i can verify still? I'd like to stop seeing the spam as well.
@inventiveHouse2965 If youre not seeing the prompt (visuals: https://www.7cups.com/forum/SiteUpdatesInformationFortheCommunity_100/UpdatesinApril2018_1549/April6FirstVersionofMemberEmailVerification_126631/1/), I would personally suggest emailing info@7cups.com
Also, incase you already have a verification email, please remember to check your soam/junk folder! :)
@IcedEthan @inventiveHouse2965 - the way things are set up, it's like a "gate" -- if you can post to the forums then you are fine because you are already passing through the gate. If you need to verify an email address, when you attempt to post in the forum a prompt will appear asking you to verify your email address (and enabling you to update it if you need to do that first).
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn thanks
I haven't gotten an e-mail
@Tinycupcake As you joined before this became necessary, youll need to do it manually.
You should see a prompt on youre profile. If youre not seeing the prompt (visuals: https://www.7cups.com/forum/SiteUpdatesInformationFortheCommunity_100/UpdatesinApril2018_1549/April6FirstVersionofMemberEmailVerification_126631/1/), I would suggest emailing info@7cups.com
Thank you forum
I haven't gotten any email from 7cups either 
@BlueRoseAoiBara As you joined before this became necessary, youll need to do it manually.
You should see a prompt on youre profile. If youre not seeing the prompt (visuals: https://www.7cups.com/forum/SiteUpdatesInformationFortheCommunity_100/UpdatesinApril2018_1549/April6FirstVersionofMemberEmailVerification_126631/1/), I would recommend emailing info@7cups.com
@Laura can anyone help me, im trying to start my own forum, but i dont know how that works?
@valerieslb - do you mean a new thread (topic or a new forum in an existing category or subcommunity?
Good to be here with y'all 👍not sure where theř verification portion comes in, anyone kind enough to enlighten me? Cheers!
@RaptorRedDelta - when you sign up for an account you're asked to verify your email. When you do so it unlocks some additional privileges.
Ok now twice here to verify email think this is just a trap xxx
@Pods355 - meaning you tried twice and it did not work? not sure what the trap is? ;)
I was asked to very fire email address to continue but I
So im sorry didn
right, so you may just be "grandfathered" in
@Pods355
@RaptorRedDelta Sorry, idk the answer. Just wanted to let you know I like your profile pic.