Easily stop chat flooding and cross-posting spam
You’ve built an engaging chat experience for live events, video games, or real-time betting. Now, your goal is to drive user adoption and retention through a spam-free experience, as spam ruins conversations, degrades the experience, and drives users away.
This is the first part of a series exploring how PubNub Illuminate can help detect and prevent two of the most disruptive types of chat spam: chat flooding and cross-posting. If spam is left unchecked, these behaviors overwhelm conversations, clutter multiple channels, and make chat unusable.
Chat flooding spam
Chat flooding—also called message flooding, burst messaging, or text walling—occurs when a user sends an excessive number of messages in a short time within the same room. This drowns out meaningful conversations and makes participation difficult for other users.
Cross-posting spam
Cross-posting—also called cross-channel spamming, multi-channel spam, mass messaging, or channel flooding—occurs when a user sends the same message across multiple rooms in a short period. This type of spam often happens with promotions, copy-paste spam, or unwanted advertisements, making discussions less relevant and harder for users to follow.
Why is spam a problem?
Unmanaged spam disrupts engagement, degrades the chat experience, and makes moderation difficult. Spam drives your fans and players away, impacting retention, monetization opportunities, and overall community health.
How Illuminate can help
PubNub Illuminate is a real-time decisioning and analytics solution that enables you to automate decision rules based on live data—without having to write code. It helps you monitor user behavior, take the appropriate action, and gain immediate insights into your rules’ performance.
One of the many use cases Illuminate supports is spam detection. With it, you can:
Detect spam instantly by tracking message frequency and cross-posting behavior
Notify moderators in real time when suspicious activity is detected
Take automated actions like warnings, mutes, or bans based on user behavior
With Illuminate, you don’t need your development team to build a custom spam filter. You can set it up yourself, fine-tune detection thresholds, and iterate on actions—ensuring a spam-free chat experience.
Now, let’s look at how to define your spam prevention strategy before walking you through how to set up Illuminate in Part Two.
Defining your spam prevention strategy
Before setting up spam detection in Illuminate, it’s important to decide how you want to handle spam. Different communities have different needs—what feels like spam in one chatroom may be normal conversation in another.
The first step is defining clear thresholds for what qualifies as chat flooding or cross-posting spam. You’ll also need to decide what actions to take when spam is detected.
Do you want to notify moderators first? This approach allows human review before any action is taken and may be suitable for those just starting out.
Should repeat offenders receive escalating penalties? A first-time warning may be enough, but repeat spam could lead to mutes or bans. Track repeat offenders by triggering an action automatically updating the user’s profile.
Are certain users exempt? Hosts, speakers, or VIP users might send more messages without being considered spam. When building your app, assign a type to those you want to exclude so you can easily set up different rules for them.
How often do you need to iterate and adapt? Spam patterns change, so ensure your solution can easily adjust decision rules in real time—without requiring developers to update code. Monitor trends and refine thresholds as needed to keep your detection effective.
Setting up decision rules that fit your chat environment ensures that spam prevention is effective without being overly restrictive.
Defining the data fields needed for detection
To detect and prevent spam, you need to track key data points. These fields help determine who is sending messages, where they are posting, and whether their behavior fits a spam pattern.
Best practices for handling spam
Once you’ve detected spam, how you respond is just as important as how you detect it. A rigid system that immediately bans users could frustrate legitimate participants, while a system that does nothing allows bad actors to take over.
Use a graduated response system Instead of taking drastic action immediately, start with low-friction interventions and escalate as needed, especially if you’re tracking repeat offenders. You can start with a warning, followed by muting the user when it’s not their first time, and finally, a ban.
Track user behavior over time To track whether or not users are repeat offenders, use PubNub App Context to record how often a user has triggered spam detection. This approach allows for progressive enforcement—users who make occasional mistakes aren’t penalized as severely as those who repeatedly spam.
Distinguish between high message volume and spam Some users—like active community members or support agents—may send many messages quickly without spamming. Consider using distinct message count instead of total message count to detect repeated messages rather than natural conversatio or setting higher spam thresholds for VIP users or moderators.
In closing
Refining your spam detection strategy creates a better user experience without unnecessary friction. And with PubNub Illuminate, you can automate detection and response—without writing code. Set up rules, monitor activity, and fine-tune your thresholds to fit your community’s needs.
In Part Two, we’ll walk through how to set up Illuminate so you can automate spam detection and response, ensuring your chat remains engaging, safe, and free from spam. Try it out in the PubNub Admin Portal and keep your chat spam-free!
