Spam, Eggs, and Spam

The Yahoo acquisition raised our profile enough that we're getting attacked by some social spammers, both in terms of friend invitations and widget-hogging. We're working hard on getting the right solutions in place and making sure they are flexible enough to make our ongoing spam-reduction efforts fruitful. Thanks for your patience while we catch up.

Comments

[Arpit]

Mybloglog is high profile now, so no doubt that people will find it worth spamming. But am sure you guys will find out some way to keep the system clean.

[Joshua P.G. Lane]

Thanks, Rafer! It seemed this would be an inevitable price for success.

The "report as spam" and "delete" functionality for managing profile and community messages has already proved useful in the fight.

Good luck!

[Tony Cai]

Yeah, Yahoo's acquisition made it popular to spam, to be honest, I've never heard of MyBlogLog before I saw it on Digg when Yahoo acquired it.

Much luck in the future! Let's see what Yahoo does to it!

[TYPELiFE]

You guys should just make it so it only accepts a "visitor" once every 10 minutes, and if a user is tracked "reading" the blog for a period of 24 hours, give them the boot for 72 hours, (also, you could make a message like "This Blogger is a spammer" on their widget as a punishment) maybe?

[Divya Uttam]

Spam has to be tackled with innovation, without spoiling the basic instincts of MyBlogLog.
The features, which made MyBlogLog, so much exciting is making the system bit irritating.
So many times some one with smiling face with an innocent request to review their site with a cool anchor text link. .I can reach there without that link. Now as profile pages have got PR, it's been exploited for link building even. #:-S .
It’s more than a fact that Yahoo is best while dealing Spam, and as you people join Yahoo to carry things ahead, I expect good breakthroughs.
All the Best and Congratulations.

[Divya Uttam]

Spam has to be tackled with innovation, without spoiling the basic instincts of MyBlogLog.
The features, which made MyBlogLog, so much exciting is making the system bit irritating.
So many times some one with smiling face with an innocent request to review their site with a cool anchor text link. .I can reach there without that link. Now as profile pages have got PR, it's been exploited for link building even. #:-S .
It’s more than a fact that Yahoo is best while dealing Spam, and as you people join Yahoo to carry things ahead, I expect good breakthroughs.
All the Best and Congratulations.

[Sonja]

What is widget-hogging?

Very curious :)

[Nicholas]

Oh the joys of having that type of problem... Though I hate spam, and I just can't stand it...

It's a pretty good gauge of how much you've gained in popularity...

So, while you figure out a solution, bask in the glory of your popularity a while.. smile.. be happy.. and then start killing those spam!

[Scott Rafer]

@ Divya -- I made up a term for the spammers who are keeping their pictures in the widgets by artificial means, and therefore hogging the widget real estate.

[Divya Uttam]

Thank you Scott, for guiding me about what widget hogging is when I already knew it. That was asked by Sonja not me. It was not only you but even others came in and dropped a peice of advice on widget hogging, at first I got confused, but now I have the answer.

Here is a peice of advice, you being the author of this blog(and others) got confused about which comment belongs to whom, there is a serious lack in Web usibility. Please design the comment section to clearly specify on who said what.

[Scott Rafer]

You are completely correct. Sorry about that. Now that we're part of Yahoo, there will be a design investment (we didn't have the resources to make one). Also, it'll be better Monday when Eric is back on customer service, and I can go back to 30ish comments a day down from the 50+ I'm doing now. I got tired and sloppy.

[Nicholas]

Stupid spammers are now so bold as to blog about their spamming experiment..

here's a profile http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/amnezia/

here's his site where he boasts about his experiment
http://www.webmasterwords.com/mybloglog-experiment-part-1

he's got over 8,000 contacts so far...

You're probably going to have to implement a (report spam) button on all mybloglog profile..

What do you think?

[Kassad]

There are more of them now (mostly SEO people), who openly admit using scripts to add themselves as contacts or admirers by thousands.

I think it defeats the purpose of this kind of community building. Community founders should have more control and automated scripts must be banned.

I hope MyBloglog will not be just one of the many crap around the internet.

[Scott Rafer]

We agree. We're just being [too?] careful in how we crack down. Per what kickstand says here: http://kickstand.typepad.com/metamuse/2007/01/gaming_mybloglo.html, there are valid forms of promotion that don't hurt anyone. We're trying to avoid getting excessively draconian.

[Nicholas]

That's alright Scott, better safe I guess... We know you guys are on top of these things.. =)

[pradero]

Me gustaría que el blog tuviera una traducción al español (spanish).
Muchas gracias

[Matt Keegan]

Spam=success. Spammers go where the latest in thing is. With Yahoo and MyBlog hooking up that comes as no surprise to me.

[William Riggins]

Hey all, glad to hear about Yahoo and the crew but as it has been said, you all need a system to combat the spam. It isn't traditional spam, which is going to make this difficult. It's more than that, it's people who want to promote themselves and whom are willing to invest the time to cut and paste a message over and over. I for one, being the first Communities member ever, know this fact.

Perhaps a referrer check in the $_SERVER range would be a good first step (though I bet Steve did this) as well as an agent check on the browser type for posterity. I would also go ahead and suggest a time limit on messages per minute, or another interval and perhaps check the content for exact duplicates. This would stop most of the cut and paste jobs, but indexing that would be a pain (and I know how hard the crunch boxes get hit already).

Anyways, if you guys want a 3rd party to think of a solution I am more than willing to offer up some free time to discuss this further, but I think I've already said too much in way of details regarding exact implementation and current implementation.

[SauerKraut]

I've got no complaints about spammers. Anyone who leaves me a message which is dupicative of what's been posted elsewhere gets deleted. And anyone who suddenly appears in my "contacts" area without my knowledge, gets deleted. I haven't had to use the "hide blog" feature yet, but I am more than willing to try it out should the need arise. All that's left for me to do is compose an actual working blog. Cannot believe 400 or so have visited my mybloglog area just this week alone - and me without an actual blog !!

[gje]

Consider the Worpress platform. Its Askimet spamkiller is mahvelous.

Keep up the good work

[Jacqueline Wales]

I've just joined the MyBlog site and have no idea what's going on, but it looks good and seems to have plenty of activity which is great for me since I'm building a business using the Net as my main point of contact. I get tons of spam each day but I catch it with SpamArrest.com which has worked pretty good for the last two years.

[marshal sandler]

Congradulations on working with yahoo,
getting tons of unwanted e mail from the site in Belguim !

[David]

I had been a loyal and paying customer of Spamarrest for some time, recently their service has been erratic and I lost a number of important messages. After not receiving adequate support I decided to cancel my recently renewed account and asked for a refund of the unused portion. Here is their response:
Hi David,

Thanks once again.

David, I am very sorry to tell you that we are not able to offer you a refund for your account. You may continue to use your Spam Arrest account till 2008-10-01 by reactivating the account.

I truly apologize for your inconvenience, David. Please do let me know if you need anything else.

Best Regards,
Peter
Technical Support Specialist
Spam Arrest