#463 – Minimizing Spam

This week we introduced new controls to make it more difficult for spammers and scammers to use Pages for nefarious purposes.

My phone rang over and over again. It was after 9 p.m. My wife was putting the kids to bed. I picked up, a man’s voice asked, “hello, is this Parabol?” He explained he received a message from Parabol stating he had unclaimed funds.

“I’m sorry sir, our platform recently introduced a feature for people to create their own webpages and it seems some spammers found it and sent a couple hundred messages. I suggest you delete that message.”

It only took two days after the release of Parabol Pages, our new knowledge management functionality, for a group of spammers and scammers to find it and begin to use it to send messages. I was surprised at how quickly they found, and automated, a mechanism for distributing their nefarious messaging.

Leading up to the release, I updated our data warehouse infrastructure to include metrics for our new Page feature and created a new, high-level report. Our first indication that something might be amiss was a spike in Pages created on the weekend.

Parabol, being a tool used overwhelmingly by teams at their work place, is generally a very quiet place on the weekend. Spammers had developed an automation that created content on Parabol, then used our email invitation feature to send this content to their intended recipients. Cleverly, they also discovered if they made their content fit within a Page’s title field, the content would be displayed in the email invitation. In a manner of a few days, they had managed to send 100s of messages.

I’m shocked at how efficiently spammers discoverer new tools and platforms in order to execute their scams. Their efficiency needed to be matched by our own in introducing new controls in order to limit their ability to use us for nefarious purposes. Our team engaged immediately, and made changes to dramatically reduce their ability to use our platform as a spam delivery system.

It’s difficult for me to see our platform be used to harm people rather than help. It’s easy to be mad at these spammers. On the other hand, they do provide a service: in addition to testing and busting our security controls, their automated activity is a form of load testing. It was great to see our new feature stand up to their onslaught.

This week we’ve saw a ~25% uptick in new user account creation. This hasn’t been matched yet by new meetings ran but historically, new account creation leads an uptick in overall platform activity.

…revised our strategy plan. Every four months we refresh our top-level strategy. This week we redrafted the strategy and will put it through our process to be approved by the executive team and the rest of the company.

…drafted our Product team’s development cycle “bets.” Over a year ago we switched from an Agile practice to operating our team using Shape Up with a few ceremonies from Agile. It’s been working well for us! Our focus for the next Shape Up cycle involves deepening the value of Pages with some features that will make it unique in the knowledge management/collaboration ecosystem.

…kick off development Cycle 11.

…run our process to get our new company-wide strategy revised and approved.