I created a new team recently, to raise awareness of cleft lips and palates and the work of Smile Train to provide free surgeries for affected families that cannot afford surgeries on their own. If you haven't already, maybe you would like to take a look and consider joining!
http://www.kiva.org/team/smile_train :-)
I was very excited that two of the donor relations staff at Smile Train accepted my invitation to sign up with Kiva and join the team. After reassuring them that we did not expect Smile Train to repay our Kiva loans they did join up and I encouraged them to introduce themselves to the team and participate in the team messages.
That is when I first learned that Kiva considers every Kiva user to be a spammer unless and until they have made a loan! When they went to the team page, these staff members at Smile Train were presented with the following message:
In order to reduce SPAM and solicitations, we have limited posting on this message board to users who have made loans. Luckily, you can make a loan now.
Well, I was embarrassed to say the very least. After frantically communicating with contactus the best solution to be found was sending them gift certificates.
I would like to propose that this spam filter system be enhanced a bit. These new Kiva members were both invites of mine, so they appear on my lender page. It seems that in the case of accepted invites, the "reputation" of the inviter could be used to vouch for the invitee. The following reputation metrics should be easy to verify.
- Length of Kiva membership. (Since December 30, 2007 in my case.)
- Number of loans. (Well over 700 in my case.)
- Number of accepted invites. (I had 7 prior to these two, none of which were spammers.)
- Number of teams or team messages sent. (I'm on 23 teams now, no telling how many messages sent.)
- Being a team captain. (I captain two teams with 400+ members.)
I think it would be relatively simple using any of these metrics for the system to figure out that I am not a spammer and my invitees are probably not spammers.
Another option that would work as well for non-invitees would be an override function so the team captain could vouch for the new member. Instead of the "you must be a spammer" message, they could be presented with a button to request full team access which would send me a message I could act upon to confirm their legitimacy.
Another anti-spam measure which I have not been affected by is the daily lender messages limit. Evidently if you send 25 messages a day you must be a spammer. I do know someone on Kiva who has frequently run into that limit. She is a tireless team builder and so she sends a lot of messages. Her stats on Kiva are very similar to my own however, so by the above metrics it would be obvious that she is not a spammer.
What is interesting to me is that the only abusive team messages I have received on Kiva were not due to new members without loans or members sending more than 25 messages a day. They were from long-time Kiva members who happened to be angry about something. Other incidents I recall hearing about involved journal spam and yet I think you don't have to be on a loan, or even a member of Kiva at all, to leave journal comments. I think all you have to do is type the two captcha words to leave a journal comment. Go figure.
