I'm a Google Plus old timer, I've been on it for weeks now. :-) It's only been in the last week that I have started to see irrelevant, rude or spammy comments showing up on my notes, and only those that I share with "Public": One way to avoid spam comments in the first place is to only circle up people you know or trust, then only sharing your notes and discussions with them, of course.

If you do want to toss your ideas into the swirling maelstrom of "Public", however, you're inevitably going to see these spammy comments appear, though hopefully we won't be overrun with them before Google figures out a smarter top-level filtering system.

I recently posted a note on Google Plus myself and when someone with the name "Sunil Gupta" decided it was the perfect place to advertise his affiliate link for some service or other, I actually posted a note saying "I wish I could remove individual comments". My friend Kee Hinkley set me straight (thanks, Kee!) and that's where this post comes from.

First off, here's the note I posted:

Fairly innocuous, certainly no reason for a spammer to add a comment pointing to their service or similar. And yet, not 20 minutes passed before this appeared:

At first I thought perhaps it was a third party site that was tracking G+ feature requests, but I clicked on the link, saw it was some affiliate related ebiz site that I have zero interest in, and realized it was spam, not actually something helpful to the discussion that was already going on.

But how to delete it or mark it as spam? As with Facebook, Google Plus has already trained me to move my cursor to the top right of the "box" that contains the element, but here no little menu magically appeared. Hmmm...

Turns out the trick is to go back to the original note in the discussion and click on the small grey triangle on the top right. A menu appears:

As you would expect, "Report or remove comments" is what we want to deal with the spammy comment from Sunil, and now two links appear adjacent to each comment in the discussion:

The "X" removes the comment, but before I do that, I want to ensure I mark it as spam so that -- I hope! -- if there are enough spam comments from a G+ account, the account will be shut down. To do that, I click on the flag...

Now I can safely delete the comment if desired, or leave it in the discussion thread, having marked it as spam. It's up to Google what happens to Sunil's account now. I kinda hope he'd get an email encouraging him to contribute to discussions rather than just spam them, but as of this early date, I have no idea how the G+ team is processing spam flaggings.