A little while back, I wrote about a brand new feature from the Robots who created the online community site 43 Things . The feature is "neighborhood watch" and it enables "community members in good standing" to contribute to fighting the site's growing spam problem.
Just to day Daniel Spils posted a follow up describing how it has worked so far.
In attacking a problem of this scale, we knew we’d have to turn to our community of users and a few automated tools. Enter Neighborhood Watch and automated spam-catching scripts such as Robotcop and Robotscout. Since Neighborhood Watch debuted, we’ve defeated more than 3,000 spam accounts set up to prey on 43 Things. We’ve also nuked a few dozen creeps and miscreants. Along the way, we’ve had just 2 errors – which happened to the same account.
He also describes some of the innards of the system:
The system is not a simple thumbs up or down vote. It uses a voting algorithm coupled with voter reputation to determine whether or not to suspend accounts.
Here's to fighting the good fight with the power of your community.