Trolls giving 'help'

Hi,

The help feature is great but inviting people to edit your code is not without risks. Earlier today I allowed a few people to help, some were very helpful but someone (I can’t tell who) started deleting entire files, and writing all over my code, things like “ahh unlucky, you got trolled” etc.

Is there anything that could be done to minimise that risk? I appreciate that by allowing strangers to edit my code I open myself up to this possibility but if it happens a lot I probably wouldn’t use that feature again.

Thanks for any advice

Aww no, sorry to hear that @elbobo.

You’re right in that there is some risk in allowing unknown users to edit your project, but there are a couple of things I can suggest.

There are a couple of trust indicators - having a registered account (users without a default smiley face avatar), and if you click on a user’s avatar when they’re in your project you can see how many thanks they’ve received. Users with an account and/or prior thanks are less likely to be those that will engage in such behavior.

You can always rollback any unwanted changes using the Rewind feature (the two left arrows next to the logs button in the editor) and that also shows you who made a specific edit. So when this happens you can report this to us and we can take a look into it and take the appropriate action. Let us know the project name this happened with earlier and we can do that now for this incident.

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Hi Gareth, thanks for getting back with the tips - I’ll be more discerning in future…

Sure yes I rewound it. It was a sample project so not a big deal.

That particular project is here if you want to have a look https://important-lily.glitch.me/

Although I looked on the rewind and there were people in there earlier who are not logged in the history, I thought it was strange. I’m afraid I can’t remember who but maybe you can see more detail than I can.

in the future there’s a lot more we’re looking at doing here, including stuff like better reporting, and possibly hiding help requests from anonymous users

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