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Best answer by Kelsi

Hey @ChristineCarloG - great question! Thanks so much for your topic. Firstly, check out our New User Guide - it’ll def prove helpful as you get used to the platform!

At this time, there is no way to directly block a specific person from booking with you via your public booking page. I really am sorry to say that (I haaate telling our users “no” in any case). 

That said, we do have some workarounds I can outline for you, and hopefully they will be helpful! 

Depending on how you've shared your link, you may want to consider exploring the following options:

  • Changing the event URL, and sharing a new event link.
  • Alternatively, if you have shared your personal scheduling page- and not the event-specific link- you could make the event secret which would ensure it did not appear on your main scheduling page. Any invitees would need to use the event-specific link to access your booking page, which would only be provided by you.
  • In the future, I would also suggest sharing single-use links for specific event types. With single-use links, meeting links will expire once used and invitees will not be able to book another. Your event-type URL will never be exposed, preventing any unwanted repeat bookings on your calendar.

We’ve taken serious measures on the back end to mitigate spam events and abusive tactics and are always looking into more ways to prevent unwanted meetings. These measures include:

  • Improvements to reduce spam, including suspension of fraudulent accounts, preventing automated account creation, bot detection on our bookings 
  • Hiring an entire team dedicated to Abuse, Trust & Safety, which is constantly working on evolving our abuse detection and response tools -
  • Maintaining an internal monitoring tool that detects and blocks spam messages generated from Calendly before they get sent. It does not catch everything, but it lowers how much spam gets out -
  • On-call teams that respond to Terms of Use violations and suspend bad accounts as soon as they are detected

If any event winds up on your Calendly that shouldn’t have, you can click the Report this event link either on the email notification you receive for the event or in the Scheduled Events tab in Calendly, as shown in the screenshot below. This cancels the meeting and reports the data to us, so we can continue to improve our abuse prevention measures:

Please note: Reporting an event does not block that invitee from booking with you in the future. However, it does add the invitee's email address to our logs which are being closely monitored by our Product team for future improvements around the issue of undesirable bookings.

I know this isn't exactly what you wanted to hear but do hope the information helps, at least somewhat!

11 replies

New Community Member
June 4, 2024

I’m adding our solution as a work around until Calendly is able to address these major concerns. This solution does require an additional piece of software/platform that we are already using for other  purposes. This solution involves Typeform. I’m not affiliated with Typeform and I’m not endorsing typeform. My Only intention is to provide a scalable workaround until we can block spam signup directly from Calendly

 

Our solution works like this:

Step 1: Ads or other top of funnel content  links to a Typeform that captures First name and email

Step 2: this then routes to a second Typeform with questions and qualifiers ( optional)

Step 3: When they complete the second form the prospects lands on a Typeform page that in essences says “ Check your email to choose the date and time for your Strategy call AND get your own guide to “ the 10 steps to building a powerful personal brand”

Step 4 successful emails will find a email from us with a direct link to our calendly and a download of the “ 10 steps PDF

 

The “free” giveaway seems to lessen the pain of having a 3 step process to sign up.  We are toying with the idea of adding an “ apology” or disclaimer during the process that basically says “ Due to the unwanted spam we receive we need to verify your email address so as to not waste your time or ours “ ….you might come up with something far more elegant than that

 

This solution obviously ends the problem with fake email addresses. If it is a real email address then it eats more of the spammers time to actually get on our calendar...so they have less time to spam others

 

Besides the obvious, if you see other ways to shorten the funnel while offering some safety from spammers, Please let me know.

 

thank you  and I hope this helps someone!