Stay Smart Online - Nextdoor Blog AU

It’s Stay Smart Online Week, in Australia (Oct 7-13) and, at Nextdoor, we believe proactive member education around online safety is key. That’s why you often see us publishing blogs and promos that remind our members of our Community Guidelines. It’s also why we launched our Kindness Reminder just two weeks ago. 

Spamming, phishing, and online safety is an issue that affects all online platforms, but our hope and desire is that Nextdoor leads the way when it comes to member safety.  One distinction to note with Nextdoor is that we require all members to verify their address and use their real name before gaining access to the platform. This in itself builds an extra layer of security to Nextdoor as compared to other platforms. 

We have multiple articles in our Help Centre that provide tips and best practices about how our members can stay safe online. We also have various detection and reporting capabilities when scam content arises; this ranges from members and neighbourhood leads flagging content to automated scam detection capabilities. 

The bottom line is that one scam incident is too many. In honour of Stay Smart Online Week, we’ve provided some helpful links and tips below. 

And, here is a reminder on how to report content and how to report a member. 

HOW TO AVOID FRAUD, PHISHING, AND SPAM

1. Don’t pay anyone you haven’t met in person.
2. Never give out financial information unless you know the member personally.
3. Beware of emails/messages asking you for personal information. Nextdoor will never ask you for financial information, your account password, your full credit card number, or PIN.
4. Beware of messages with mismatched fonts, a lot of typos and/or misspellings, or oddly placed accents. 
5. Beware of messages that claim to have your password attached. Nextdoor will always send you a secure link to reset your password. We will never send a password to you via email. 

To read more tips on avoiding fraud, phishing, and spam, read our blog here. 

TIPS FOR DEALING WITH UNWANTED MEMBER ACTIVITY: 

1. You can mute a neighbour that you don’t want to hear from. The muted neighbour will not know that you’ve done so, but you will no longer see their posts. Read more here. 
2. There are several tools to help you handle neighbourhood conflict. Read more here.
3. If a certain discussion doesn’t interest you, you can hide the post without blocking the memers. Here’s how to do that. 
4. Fake names are not allowed on Nextdoor and violate our Community Guidelines. If you see a member with a fake name, please report them so we can suspend their account. 
5. There are clear rules about reporting and promoting business. Make sure what you’re seeing follows these rules and report it if it doesn’t.  

Nextdoor exists to empower neighbours to build stronger communities everywhere. Let’s work together to make each and every neighbourhood a better place where we can all lend a helping hand. 

Click here to contact Nextdoor support.