Google+ gains anti-spam filter, forms sharing, and more prominent post links

Google has expanded capabilities of its Google+ social platform with new features that help prevent spammers from posting comments to posts, retrieve direct post URLs more easily, and share document forms on Google+.

As noted by Google’s Product Vice President Bradley Horowitz, “Our spam and abuse teams rock.” He was referring to changes to the comment moderation system on Google+. No longer do users have to put up with spammers flooding public posts with annoying click-bait links.

From now, users can delete or report a comment on a post by clicking the gray flag icon next to the comment. They can also immediately block the poster. As Google noted, blocking someone “is a big deal,” so make sure the poster is a spammer and not a known person from one of your circles.

Details on additional features are available  after the break.

Another little nugget was spotted in Google Docs, a new button to share document forms. As seen in the above screenshot, clicking the new Google+ button at the top right of the form creation windows will let a user share a finished form with Google+ circles. This way, the user could easily tap crowd-source answers from circles or even run mini-polls across their networks. Unfortunately, it does not work with Google+ pages (yet).

Last but not the least, as of recently, users can now get a direct URL of any public Google+ post just by clicking the “post” link. Previously, they would have to click on the timestamp, which did not appear as a hyperlink (though it was). By making these direct links more prominent, Google is hoping many more people will refer to Google+ content in their blog posts.