Hello everyone! I'm delighted to bring you our second feature announcement of the year, in this second entry of the new Journaly TL;DR Weekly series!

A Few Words on the Journaly Community & Culture

One of my favorite things about Journaly truly is the amazing community culture that we have all developed together. The platform has become a sort of social media platform, but one where everyone is posting nice and meaningful content, and we're all just trying to help and encourage each other – generally to learn languages, but I've seen countless examples of it going way beyond that. Some people have even met and grown into the most wonderful friendship group right here on Journaly, which I've had the true joy of witnessing in person and this will always be one of the highlights of, well... my life – seriously! ❤️ I can only hope that others will experience this on the platform (maybe they already have and I'm simply unaware!), and that maybe, just maybe... one day this could even become a normal occurrence on Journaly. The friendship group referenced above put together the very first in-person Journaly Meetup back in Winter 2021 and it was wonderful; I also cannot wait for this to become a regular occurrence as well.

The Arrival of Spam 🤖

I have to say that I'm so delighted this far into our journey, the above statements about the culture and content here on Journaly are still true! Except for one small hitch... Some of you may have noticed that over the last year or so in particular, spam posts began appearing on the platform. Recently there have been a few times where it got particularly bad. These posts tend to be blatant advertisements for a product or service where it is clear the author is not seeking feedback or to participate in the community, which is in violation of our Terms of Service. I suppose that's a milestone for us that people now find Journaly a place where it's worth posting spam 😆😅 But this has definitely made me sad because it degrades the User Experience for everyone and undermines the tremendous effort we've all put into creating that marvelous culture I described above.

Some of you very kindly took time out of your day to report these posts to me, but there were two problems:

1. There was no easy way to do this, so users had to email customer support (hello@journaly.com) which was very time-consuming.
2. I had no easy way behind the scenes to remove these posts and users. The only way was to manually delete them from the database, but because we have a lot of relational data, this was very time-consuming and also error-prone, so I would spend around 15 - 20 minutes just deleting one post because I also needed to delete all the related database records very carefully before I could actually delete the post or user.

The New "Report Spam" Feature 🎉

Well, I'm delighted to announce that we've solved both of these problems so that it is now super fast and easy for you to report these posts and for me to remove them!

At the bottom-right of any post, you'll see a little red flag icon that you can click to report that post as spam. This automatically sends an email to our Customer Support team (me! 🙋🏻‍♂️) in a format that makes it very easy for me to collect and review reports. We've also built a mechanism for safely removing a post or a user, depending on the situation, in just 1 or 2 seconds.

Sharing The Results & Thanking Our Spam-Reporting Heroes! ❤️

Over the last couple of weeks since we silently launched this feature, some of you started using it and I was just able to review and delete 70 spam post from 17 users! These were all users solely using the platform to post advertisements.

I would like to take a moment to thank the users who reported those posts to us, including a few who took the time to write in long before we had this feature:

• Jib_Jabs
• nomadicvegan
• MimmiCaro
• effiesays
• ValentinaEla
• chazy
• ManeskinQueen
• extremelycool
• Lariza
• AnGhaothAbhaile
• Ouassou
• learner5923
• ficelle
• isaac_caasi
• Griffin
• LindasLinguas
• FocaFofa

All of you will receive a little something with the next exciting new feature that will be coming out soon, so be on the lookout for that! 😄

Thank you everyone for being a part of that truly amazing community I described at the start of this post and the culture we've built. Thank you in advance to those who choose to help us keep the feed clean by reporting cases of obvious spam via this new feature. I review every single report, so if you're unsure if something should be reported, feel free to write to hello@journaly.com or simply report it and I'll take it from there.

Do you have any thoughts on this post? How about that idea of having official Journaly Meetups in the future? Let me know in the comments!