Friending and Spam Update

As part of our spam reduction efforts, we're suspending the "BillyBob (or whomever) added you as a friend" email notifications. You will still receive and email when the Friending becomes mutual, but not when the friend invitation might be unsolicited. A lot of the attraction for the spammers has been the number of emails that go out with links to their pages on MyBlogLog.

For the moment, if you want to know who has added you as a friend without you responding, check out your page. If you have any unrequited contacts, there's a section called "My Admirers." Just click on the photos there and you can make those people your contacts too.

If there are replacement Friending notifications that you'd like us to add, please let us know.

Comments

[Lyndoman]

I think this is a good move, although why not give the power to the people?

Allow people to congigure their own email alerts.

Allowing them to chose when to:

Get email when a contact is added.

When someone joins their community.

After someone visits their blog.

If their blog blog makes the Hot page, like ours did this week.

Putting the control with the people allows them to benefit from the features without suffering the spam.

[Kevin Henney]

I agree with Lyndoman, give us the power to configure our own email alerts. And give us the option of getting just one email daily that summarizes contact and community activity, rather than getting a seperate email for every action.

[Shane Coffey]

After reading this I realized this blog and in particular this post I realized that I am a "spammer". I belonge in SA meetings, as of right now I will stop spamming folk, just to get them to come to my site!

[Garry Conn]

Not a bad idea. But did you consider just having a notification ON/OFF button that gives the user the decision to receive these notifications? By default this could have been set to NO and if the user decides on receiving the notifications, they would have to change this in their profile control panel.

- Garry

[Scott Rafer]

We have an email alerts on/off option at the bottom of the profile editing page. What we effectively did is to exempt this particular notification from that parameter. Apparently that was too heavy-handed, but I'm not sure the right solution is obvious.

The issue we're trying to address is that not all notifications are treated equal. Some (like the one we've shot) are very useful to spammers and others are not. We could provide a different option for each and every kind of notification, that seems needlessly complex. What level of granularity works?

[Kassad]

Is it possible to get notifications through rss ?
So, there could be a neutral place like netvibes to receive notifications, avoiding email. Or, it may be not necessary at all.
People caring about their community would check in regularly.

Also, it may be a good thing if the users had the power to remove unwanted contacts. I run blogs that use langauage spoken by fifteen millions.
I could not believe people joining up for something they do not understand.
There could be a small form form where applicants may explain why they want to join up.

I find quite intriguing the community building idea so I want to make use of it.
First, I will put up an English language blog, next a "real" project and let the people decide if it worths to join. But not another ground for childplay, spammers or ego-builders.

btw. this captcha is quite hard to read. Text or math one would be better.

[Divya Uttam]

I want to take this place for other very important thing, which MyBlogLog is not taking into consideration.
It's about you people are not considering who is joining MyBlogLog, and if there is some person behind a profile, or if a same person can join MyBlogLog with different identities and start spamming here.
With no confirmation required, any person can just increase his community and come into limelight of most hot communities.
I was just going through your top 50 communities, and reached http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/Iain-Dales-Diary/
Like many of the top communities this also had too many black faces as members, and this time i reviewed each profiles. So this was the trend out here,
1)Vlad_the_Impala
Member Since: 5th Sep 2006
Last Login: 24th Oct 10:33 am
2) SimonP
Member Since: 5th Sep 2006
Last Login: 5th Sep
3) Member Since: 5th Sep 2006
Last Login: 5th Sep
4) Member Since: 5th Sep 2006
Last Login: 5th Sep
5) Member Since: 7th Sep 2006
Last Login: 7th Sep
6) Political_Teenager
Member Since: 6th Sep 2006
Last Login: 10th Sep This persond do have blog whose url is not found.
7) darkwinterthorn
Member Since: 7th Sep 2006
Last Login: 6th Jan
8) plankspanker
Member Since: 19th Sep 2006
Last Login: 19th Sep
9) uk-events
Member Since: 1st Oct 2006
Last Login: 1st Oct
10) Chris_Whiteside
Member Since: 24th Sep 2006
Last Login: 24th Sep
About 85 members of this community dont have faces, most of these have only joined this particular community, nobody have any website with them or even if they have those are just crape automated blogs.
And the most common thing of these profiles is that after joining the community they never logged in MyBlogLog. Great coincidence.
I think you would take this type of spam seriously, as being in top 50 blogs can help in getting really good traffic.

Divya Uttam.

[Anita]

Strange, I've been receiving 'XYZ has added you as a contact' messages all day .. must all be mutual friends.

In general though, I agree that this is a great idea

[SauerKraut]

I'd like to know why my blog is unaccessable. I registered with google, got the confirming email, wrote a few things on the blog and set up a profile, accessed it a couple times, posted it but now it cannot be accessed due to "member not known" or something to that affect. What's up? What am I not doing correctly?

[Wendell]

What is the purpose of MyBlogLog? To rate sites or to connect people?

Just my two cents, but I'm not bothered by people racking up popularity points, phoney or otherwise, because it has no impact on my viewing or blogging. I use MyBlogLog (as one of many tools) to find interesting sites. If a site doesn't interest me, I don't go there again. I also don't make it a "contact". MyBlogLog is - in my perception - a modest tool that is both easy to use and consistent.

I would be sorry to see that simplicity lost in response to concerns over competition for readers or traffic.

But, then, maybe I'm missing the point.

[Scott Rafer]

Hi Wendell, I personally agree with you -- "site discovery" is the reason I like to use MyBlogLog. However, lots of people like to meet the bloggers behind the blog. For them, some of the spam has been problematic, so we're working hard to minimize it. If you are surfing around without joining communities or friending many people, we should be able to keep your experience streamlined.