Spam-a-lama-dama

Have you ever gotten this message:     

     Hey, love your site, check out mine at http://spammer.com/spamalot

Sure, we all have...  And most of us are quick to report the obvious spam (and rightly so). The challenge is that while many of us are quite annoyed about these sort of messages, some users like the give and take of these exchanges.  We've seen communities grow and actually flourish by these seemingly impersonal 'spam-like' intros.  In fact some of these have grown into communities that bounce personal communiques back and forth hourly. 

So we begin to see sites that you and I may be uninterested in checking out are getting widespread membership and full-fledged communities are borne. So, what to do?

There are a few methods we are investigating, even as I write, that could help us weed out members who consistently game the system.

One such method we will be employing today.  The way that it works is to put a cap on the number of messages a user can send per day.  The caveat here is that if that user receives a message back, which of course denotes conversation, the person's daily limit will increase.  For us, this seems a worthy method to try.

The limit will be 20 initially, and if we see that it is just not enough then we'll increase it.  Again, your feedback on this is vital for us to know if the message cap method is successful.  Please do not hesitate to tell us if we are off our rocker.  Don't hold back (I know you won't) because we need the help of our users more than you realize.

MyBlogLog is first and foremost a community.  We exist to serve you and we need to know how we are doing there.  I look forward to hearing how we are doing.  Just be gentle, remember, I'm new here.

Comments

[ilker]

Are you kidding me? You simply want your legitimate users to leave MBL for another social network, is it?

[blessed1]

Thank you for the reminder and the update!

[Eric Marcoullier]

Ilkeryoldas -- we're testing it. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else. If the concept is right but the number is too high or low, we'll change it. Given the number of people who respond to your emails, you shouldn't have any problems posting all you like -- you're a MyBlogLog celebrity.

[Howard]

I'm OK with this test; probably a good idea. I'm brand new to MBL so, not knowing better, I sent a lot of comments just to say thanks cuz I saw others saying thanks to others...blahblahblah. Vicious cycle. Whatever makes MBL better!

[Martin Lee]

I like this idea. Some people literally send a message to everyone telling about their website.

[WasupMait]

Please don't limit the messages i mean i don't send more then 19 messages a day but i think 20-50 would be enough to limit? And dont start with "buy premium" to send unlimited messages...

[kucau]

ermm , thanks . 20 per day is sufficient

[HART (1-800-HART)]

Well, you probably can guess HART aka PETLVR's response .. this is ALMOST AS BAD as limiting us to join only 15 communities per day. If MBL is trying to restrict social interaction, than certainly this is a great way to do that! Unfortunately, people (including myself) still believe that MyBlogLog will eventually do the right thing and REMEMBER why you are popular.

[Alex-BAMO]

I love MBL but that might change very soon! I think that 15 contacts & 15 communities to join per day was a good decision. But 20 messages is ridiculous! I'm 100% with Ilker on this one. Another social network seems quite tempting at the moment... :(

[HART (1-800-HART)]

If you want to do something Monumental here to HELP THE COMMUNITY ... get a spam plugin and stop moderating these comments, or use Capthas! :p

[HART (1-800-HART)]

3rd post (sorry!) PS To Martin Lee's comment ..

I think that the "Show Messages From Contacts" or "Show Messages From Everybody" stops this from getting out of hand, IMHO.

[WrightHandBlogger]

Just dreadful!

This is an awful thing to consider for a site so hot as I consider MyBlogLog to be.

I was just about to write something about how I consider this to be one of the best possible sites for newbie bloggers like me - and now this announcement.

You come up with a virtually perfect little community then screw it up with a limit up 20 messages per day????

Did you guys really think this through?

I mean, pardon my venting, but this site could be extraordinarily useful to some of us - that is - unless it starts down this path of "limits is the answer".

I'd strongly recommend that you talk this out with a roundtable group of people like Ilkeryoldas and other responsible users before taking such a dreadful, non-Web 2.0 step.

Note: If you sense any real heat from this it's not because I've ever sent 20 messages per day on MBL. But, rather, I have seen 20+ groups I've wanted to join. Of course, I couldn't do it. So, that left a bad taste in my mouth. Now, we have one more take away approach to solving community problems. (I can't believe I'm getting so worked up about MBL! lol)

Why not try something really creative?

Charge a dollar, dime, nickel, penny or something based on message volume, perhaps. This seems like a better solution than boxing us in and suffocating the life out of MBL.

Before going too far, I really wish you'd also take a quick tour of some of the formerly hot social groups that became dismissive of the cultures that made them so hot in the first place.

One of those groups should have been 10 times its current size. But, it took the wrong approach to solving community problems.

I wish you guys the best.

Thanks,
WrightHandBlogger
7 April 2007

[Alex-BAMO]

In my comment above, I said I'll leave MBL for another social networking site. That won't happen because I really, really love MBL! But let me explain why this new rule S*U*C*K*S:

You've already suppressed spam!

On the profile page, you don't show messages (by default) from people that aren't the user's contacts. I suggest that you do the same for the community page..

You also have a hide list, so if somebody's spamming, you ban them from your community. End of story!

If someone wants to read spam, It's up completely up to him/her!

---------------------------

I have tons of ongoing relationships at MBL and just 20 messages per day would ruin them completely...

---------------------------

Here's a question for you:

Why are you trying to (destroy MBL!) change a system that functions perfectly as it is? And don't give me the 'we're just testing bullsh*t' !!

[Antman]

Yo dawg, ya gettin to corporate, I think Yahoo is stirrin too much of the pot. Ya trying to control too much. The community will control itself. If folks are messin with the community, the community will fix it. Have faith my friend, the community has power, the less you dabble the better.

[Antman]

One more thing, I got 172 community members. The assumption is they want to hear from me. Ya muffling my microphone, I promote the little guy. If it is that important to ya to get in the mix, why don't ya limit the number of messages to people outside of your community and contacts/friends. Then ya can kill a couple of birds with a few stones. Don't accept a lot of contacts and don't get spammed, join a lot and it comes with the territory. I say, keep it real and stay out of it, but if ya just can't help ya self give community incentives to limit messages, don't just pull the rug. Peace!!!!!

[andrew wee]

The message cap is a bit of a bummer.

I've have thought the toggle to only show msgs from within your network would've capped a bunch of the spam...

I think the number of messages you might possibly send out is a function of the size of your network too. Maybe the msg quota could be toggled to reflect that, and if a MBL member is one of good standing, that could be reflected too?

Otherwise, keep up the great work, MBL krew!
:)

[Rodney Rumford]

Congrats on your new job Robyn!

Actually trying to contain the random comments of "check out my blog" (I consider this spammy and annoying and leechy) is partially an educational issue.

The 20 a day limit dos not hinder my level of communication that i do on mbl, however it might upset some users. Trying to control conversations is like herding cats. Limiting the level of conversations is a bad idea. The professional spammers will find a way to create several other accounts and run around your limit that way. I have some thoughts on how you could do this better but i don't want to do a long dissertation here.

There are other less restrictive ways to control people that behave badly and not punish other users. You will need to build some new features to accomplish this, but other community sites have found there way through this very issue.

Rodney Rumford

[andy cochrane]

i have some beef with the way things are currently run, have for a while, here is my 2cents:

1) don't limit messages at all
2) install a message board functionality so that we can publish bulletins rather than sending messages for announcements or mass messages
3) when adding friends you have 3 choices: ____is my friend, ____is my family, I'm a fan of____. once you add them, they go into a generic pool of "contacts". this is problematic, because you have a pool of people who you have invited but never reciprocated, and several types of contacts, all in one big pool with no segregation. what if i want to quickly find just my friends, or send a message to just the members of my community, etc.

i think there is a spam problem here because there are not enough non-spammy ways to get in touch with your own contacts, or even make new ones. its off topic, but i also want to know how to customize your own profiles, like how techcrunch has done. did they buy the customization or is it there in the profile editing options and i am just not seeing it?

i love mybloglog, and i think that the av club blog would be nowhere near where it is today without the connections i have made here, i want it to be all that it can be.

-andy

[Peter Hawley]

Let's see how it works. No problems, yet. But it's early.

[Arpit]

Thats bit annoying.. I think a better step would be to disallow the HTML links in the messages. This would certainly help in reducing spam.
20 msgs a day is certainly a limitation to many of MyBlogLog users,

[Franxbudi]

I think is ok as long as 50 messages per day

[Franxbudi]

Please don't test me because I can't connect with my friend in myblog community.Thx

[Michael Goldberg]

Thats a great idea Eric. Also you might want to find a way so a person clicking on avatars randomly has some kind of time out period or something. I worte an article about it not too long ago and it actually got me in the "hot communities" section for a few days. I have occasionally tested it out since then and I still get a few people joining here and there, but I have not really put the kind of effort in to it when I made the hot communities section. PS thanks for leaving the comment on my blog. I have a follow up question if you have the time to respond. :)

[Lord Matt]

Um... I would not mind so much if my messages always showed up after I posted them.

Other than that a 20 message limit sounds like a restriction. 20 message margin of discussion sounds like a feature. You need to NAME it so as to show that a comment on your page / blog is a possitive thing (keeps the margin neat).

So perhaps a graphic with -20 ... 0 ... +20 so that at -20 SPAM and at +20 Mr(s) Popular. A little arrow shows how well you are doing socially.

You could then rate the spamishness of a person and at a spammish level comment possting disables untill they get some feed back.

To go with that there shoud be a Del-Spam link which removes the dodgy comment and scores the commenter Spam+1 for the day.

Then the community itself could soon cripple the spammers.

Extra points if any user marked Spam+1 more than a user controlled number of time is blocked from any contact at all with the user or his/her blogs.

Massive link bate and love from arround the world if you give users other (meaningless?) social stats about themselves (that they can put in widgets) with huge geek attention is you make a basic RSS request based API for people to play with (ie a dynamicly generated feed).

Nobel prizes if you make is all AJAXy too.

[Robyn Tippins]

You have no idea how helpful this is to our decisions. Please feel free to vent and suggest and you can be sure we'll listen.

First, this message limit is not applicable to communities. This is only for member-to-member communication.

Second, if you send a message and get a response, that message does not count against your 20 daily limit. So, my hope is that it will not limit conversation greatly.

Third, if the number of messages is too low, then we are open to moving them up to some other number.

This is where your comments are so very valuable. Please continue to let us know how you feel so we can make the MyBlogLog experience one that is helpful to you.