In order to make SCENE a spam-free experience, there are a number of measures that can be implemented. The following techniques can be applicable to scenarios ranging from signing up with the application to controlling the number of “check-in” per user for a certain venue/event.

1. Captcha and the Honeypot Technique: one or a combination of these 2 can be used to determine whether someone trying to sign up is legit or it’s a spamming bot. Captcha is displaying an image with a challenge text and asking the user to enter that text. Spamming bots will not be intelligent enough to read the Captcha image and will fail the challenge test. The Honeypot technique is implemented by adding hidden fields to the form by setting css attribute display:none. Spamming bots will try to fill these hidden fields and submit the form while legit users will not be able to see these fields and leave them empty.

2. Limited User Functionality: once the user sign-up, we can limit the number of functionalities and privilages a user have access to while they are being monitored for any spam behaviour. After the user reaches a certain level within the application, more functionalities will be made available to them.

3. Device Limit: any user will be able to use their device with one Scene registered user only and they won’’t be able to sign in to multiple Scene accounts from the same device. This will make sure that a venue/event host will not attempt to make fake check-ins with multiple accounts from the same device or programming a bot to do the same. Similarly, the user will only be able to be signed in to Scene from one device at the same time. Hence, the user isn’t giving a chance to check-in from multiple places at the same time in order to gain more rewards/points.

4. Crowdsourcing Users’ Spam Reports: every user will have the option to report a spamming user or event/venue. The application moderators will then look at these reports and decide whether the user/event being reported is a spam or legit based on crowdsourced information from Scene users.

5. Social Honeypot: the application moderators can create “honeypot” users and events and use them to monitor spam behaviour of Scene users. Then by analysing the data, they can identify spamming behaviour and block it and introduce new controls to prevent spammers accordingly.