The Formspring Blog

Here on the Formspring blog, we usually share news about cool new features or fun ways you can use Formspring to do everything from applying to college to prepping for Mother’s Day. Something we don’t talk about quite as often is all the work our team does behind the scenes to make sure every single Formspring member has a safe and fun experience each time they log in.

For all of us here at Formspring, the safety and enjoyment of our community is a top priority. It’s what makes our service fun, and what makes our company who we are. Being a parent myself, I know firsthand how important online safety is. I’d never want my children — or any other children — to be in a situation online that was anything less than fun, constructive and enjoyable.

With this constant priority in mind, we have worked hard since launching 18 months ago to ensure we’re always improving the safety and privacy options we offer on Formspring. Over the past 90 days alone, we’ve been incredibly busy on several new safety features that are now live across our service. These include:

Flagged questions:
Just like an email inbox, we know that you sometimes might get a message in your Formspring inbox that is either spam or just plain inappropriate. We’re committed to taking this out of the experience, and are very proud of the impact “flagged questions” has had on cutting out undesirable content from members’ inboxes.

Sent Questions:
Your “sent box” gives you a complete history of all the cool and creative questions you ask every day. It is also helpful from a safety perspective because it keeps anyone who might be misusing Formspring accountable. Sent Questions serves as a powerful reminder of one’s behavior, as well as gives our team and parents insight into an important aspect of our service.

Easy Blocking:
Any question, from any user, can be blocked right from your inbox – even if it comes from someone with their name hidden. This is a powerful, simple way for you to control who contacts you again.

Partnership with MIT:
Our ongoing work with MIT takes bullying detection to the next level using natural language processing. It’s a very important project our team is hoping will soon be tested across our site. This adds to our current efforts around content filtering that have already had a clear impact on the safety of our community.

With the above features in place — along with your ability to control and change your settings at any time to fully protect your account, or choose to only allow questions from people who show their name — every member of our community has the tools they need to have a positive and fun experience here on Formspring.

Just as important to these updates is our response to anyone who sees something go wrong when on Formspring. We’re very proud that our team responds to every member inquiry within 48 hours, and 75% of those within 24 hours. It’s so important for us to take action on anything that violates our Community Rules, and your efforts to help us by reporting violations make Formspring an even better community.

We created Formspring to give you a fun, easy way to learn more about your friends and the people you care about. The updates described above are a start to our continued commitment to making everyone’s Formspring experience a positive one. We will continue to add new features to Formspring to ensure that everyone has a great time on Formspring.