Community Blacklist

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shugrue
Posts:11
Joined:Fri Feb 27, 2009 3:50 pm
Community Blacklist

Post by shugrue » Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:05 pm

I understand how the "Personal Blacklist" works and that you need to either block the list or forward to voice mail. Combining the two options would be better.
But I'm not sure what the "Community Blacklist" is for. I don't see any way to interact with it except for activating it. And again you either block it or forward it to voice mail.
Could somebody from ooma please elaborate on what I suspect might be a great feature.

mashean
Posts:5
Joined:Tue Apr 14, 2009 6:17 am

Re: Community Blacklist

Post by mashean » Tue Apr 14, 2009 5:35 pm

I don't work from ooma but this is from their site...


Community Blacklist [beta]

Harness the power of the ooma calling community and block unwanted callers. Think of it as Survivor for telespammers. As other ooma users vote callers "off the island" by adding them to their blacklist, we're there to tally up the votes. Combined with our sophisticated algorithms for detecting phone spamming patterns, and you've got the mother of all blacklists. Who needs the Do Not Call registry?

thively
Posts:94
Joined:Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:47 am

Re: Community Blacklist

Post by thively » Tue Apr 14, 2009 7:10 pm

I'm reluctant to use this because I'm afraid it will block legitimate calls. I'm not sure how the black list get's it's data. If it's a compilation of what all users have added to their personal black lists, then what others consider an undesirable I may consider legitimate.

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Dennis P
Ooma Moderator
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Location:Palo Alto, CA
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Re: Community Blacklist

Post by Dennis P » Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:22 pm

Currently the ooma community blacklist is comprised of numbers culled from:

- a "honeypot" of non-customer numbers which attract automated dialers and other types of telemarketing calls
- blacklisted numbers from ooma customers

For the latter, we have a threshold before we'll add a number to the blacklist. This is to avoid blacklisting of legitimate callers.

We have some ideas on how better to share the community blacklist. For now, if you are worried about opting-in and missing calls - just send it to voicemail. Most telemarketers and automated dialers will hang up before leaving a vm.

thively
Posts:94
Joined:Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:47 am

Re: Community Blacklist

Post by thively » Wed Apr 15, 2009 3:46 pm

Thanks for the detail Dennis! That's exactly what I wanted to know, especially about the threshold.
This information actually encourages me to use it. I do use the VM method on my personal black list anyway.

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