14 DAY TRIAL // Google+ has been relatively spam free, in the sense that its anti-spam mechanisms have been doing a good job. But there's still spam on the social network and, even if it's detected, it's still annoying if only for the authors of a post.
Now Google is making it even less of a hassle by making comments it deems to be spam even more hidden.
"We're always working to make Google+ a great place for quality conversations. In fact, we aggressively detect and remove comment spam before it even appears in the stream," Google's Nandini Kappiah wrote.
"As a post owner, you could have seen these grayed out comments inline and restored them as appropriate. But today we're making some visual changes that clean up your view of your content," she added.
Any spam detection mechanism suffers from two big problems, spam sometimes makes it through and content that isn't spam is sometimes labeled as such. Both can be a problem, but it's sometimes better to err on the side of caution.
This is why Google+ doesn't delete spam comments outright, rather it gives authors a chance to review the comments and see if they really are spam.
Until now, spam comments were removed from the regular comment stream, but authors still saw them grayed out. For a particularly popular post, always a target for spammers, even this could be distracting and made authors unable to follow the conversation.
Which is why Google is now grouping all spam comments and removing them altogether, but allowing authors to see them if they want to by clicking on the link titled "Show comments removed as spam."
Of course, the move may mean that more legitimate comments will be removed by Google+'s anti-spam system without authors finding them, but it will also make for a better experience for most people.