Question regarding Looker Studio Community

[Penelope]

@Roderick and others, I was wondering if any of you kept up with the Looker Studio Googlers? I know this is not really the place to ask however their help community seems to be getting hit with spam and I am not sure who to say things like this community is getting spam (example of the spam: https://support.google.com/profile/240975014?hl=en). When I say looker Studio community I mean https://support.google.com/looker-studio/community?hl=en.

[Willie_Turney]

Hi @Penelope - I appreciate you bringing this to our attention. I'll work with some team members to make sure the spam issue is being looked at. Again many thanks for flagging this!

[Penelope]

@Willie_Turney I got a heads up today from a Google product expert (he is a PE in other products not Studio which is not part of the PE program) concerning Looker Studio:

Spammers are now using a new technique - linking to a looker dashboard from a seemingly innocuous thread, and the dashboard itself is full of spam.

Happy Thanksgiving! 

[Penelope]

Hey Willie, I am noticing now that community is becoming a dumping grounds for URLs: https://support.google.com/looker-studio/thread/245950397 (Profile URL: https://support.google.com/profile/245339893) The Looker Studio people might want to figure out how to prevent things like this due to all help communities do get indexed rather quickly. 

[Willie_Turney]

Hey Penelope - thanks as always for flagging. Looks like that user has been banned. I'll forward this info to the internal team as well. Thanks!

[Penelope]

@Willie_Turney is this still the best method to pass along feedback to you concerning the Looker Studio community or shall I use another way? There are several Google Product Experts on the support.google.com that really want to pass along information/feedback/thoughts to the Looker Studio team but none of us know how to contact that team however. 

[Penelope]

Thank you so much @Willie_Turney !! I have been trying to keep an eye on that community and I probably report five users a day along with up to 10 comments a day. 

Slightly offtopic but I am wondering if the Googlers there are struggling to keep up with posts since they get up to 600 a month and only 10 get answered a month so it might be nice if a solution could be found where almost all the posts can get answered rather than just a handful. I also know the Google Analytics help community is severely undermanned as well and they get hundreds of posts a month so I think it would be nice if a solution was found so that these communities can get the support they deserve since they are getting hundreds of legit questions as far as I can tell (these products are outside my scope of knowledge). 

[Penelope]

This is not exactly related to the spam issue but since I do look at that community typically daily but if https://support.google.com/looker-studio/thread/228616290?msgid=243216901 is by a Google employee or community specialist, it doesn't badge him as one so if this fellow is with Google somehow, maybe badging him would be a good idea (because that also means any comments they do make will trigger a notification of all varieties for the users). Profile https://support.google.com/profile/238493956?hl=en

Spam seems less in the past few days so either the spam filters are working better or the spammers are taking a break. 

[ZeCrunchy]

Hey, I get two spam emails a day from at least two different "(via Looker Studio) <looker-studio-noreply@google.com>" accounts a day. I had not successfully found a place to report this and google help docs point me to a form that won't go anywhere once I click on Looker Studio. Is this a place where I can report it/them?
One points to https://lookerstudio.google.com/s/rJWWqy-K4xs and the other https://lookerstudio.google.com/s/lLXZNb47DLw

[Penelope]

Great question. Unfortunately, the only way I know of how to report spammy reports and dashboards is via https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid=10600927913180849200-NC#ts=1115658%2C73.... However that form seems broken at this time since once I click on the non-legal reason, it doesn't move forward and when I click on the next option (which is the child imagery), it brings me over to https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/148666. So really great question and I will be waiting along with you on what the answer is, too!!

[Ktrs]

I don't want to misuse this thread but I think the context is appropriate: I would like to raise my observation that the Looker Studio Community Forum has become completely useless lately. There is just not enough engagement from community, the administration is horrible, many legitimate questions get zero answers for weeks. I see lots of relatively recent threads that point out to obvious bugs, which were simply "locked" without any answer. Sometimes I want to share a useful tip on that bug but I can't because, it is locked. Seriously what's the point of locking a thread without an answer? Also, almost no Google employees are involved in discussions. The best recent example is this thread, where many people were complaining about a major bug for more than a week. After a while, the issue was silently solved. But nobody from Google informed the community about what was going on. This is not how the support of such a major BI tool should be run. Very disappointing. We are kind of obligated to use looker studio because of our GA4 transition and standard reports in GA4 are completely useless. The lack of support in looker studio makes us consider ditching Google Analytics altogether for Adobe Analytics.

[Penelope]

You are not alone in your observations. I personally like to call the Looker Studio an "orphaned community" and another orphaned community is the Google Analytics community (if anyone knows how to contact that team, let me know). 

[AschAschAsch]

Getting the same spam message every day at the same time for over a year. Inside is some phishing website for Russians.

[Penelope]

You should be able to submit feedback inside of the product as well. The only way I know of how to report actually Looker Studio dashboards would be going through the legal content troubleshooter via https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?sjid=1538228432177784539-NC#ts=1115658%2C736.... 
But hopefully @will3 and @Roderick can comment more for us on how to report and the such like. 

[AschAschAsch]

Thank you for the advice, but I don't use that product. I only receive daily spam from it. Legal content troubleshooter asks for more personal details than I'm willing to share.

I know that it's incredibly hard to contact Google about anything and they are extremely slow to react on feedback. It took like 3 years for them to close similar spam backdoor in Google Calendar.

Thank you.