Catching the spammers
Cornell quotes Scoble who quotes Toni Schneider about advertising here on wordpress.com. Cornell states:
You allow advertising, you’re gonna get spammers. The least you can do is to kill off the splogs when they get reported, unlike Blogger.
and he acknowledges that we will. Sure as hell we will. There are a couple of things to consider:
- We actually do use our Terms of Service. You break it, you leave. It really is that simple.
- Not being found. This is getting much harder to do.
One way we have is for people to report a blog using the admin bar link. I can use that report to find other blogs by the same person in several ways and if they splog once they lose all their blogs. There are a couple of people who note everything odd they come across and send it in – and they are very good.
Additionally I have other tools which I can use to zero in on suspicious blogs. If the names are just plain spammy then it gets removed immediately. If it looks bad but it’s not quite bad enough then they go on the Watch list and they get blown away as soon as 1 bad post is made. If someone has made a genuine mistake and it is very obvious from the rest of the blog that is really is a mistake then there is room for a little discretion – but they too still get watched.
Splogs will happen – they just won’t live very long. You report, we remove 
December 17, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Good to know Mark, Thanks!
December 17, 2006 at 4:14 pm
Mark –
I’m going to take a purposefully provocative view here just to test the boil of the water I’m about to start.
The whole “we don’t allow advertising” on WordPress.com is untenable because it is not true and cannot be sustained. If someone embeds a YouTube video showing a classic beer commercial from television then, some would say, in violation of the TOS.
I am also gravely concerned with this “reporting your neighbor to the authorities” style of policing blogs that some believe are in violation of the TOS. I think it sets up a nasty precedent for gang-tackling and offers a needlessly heavy-handedness in policy decision-making in the fingers of those who do not deserve to wield that power as common end users and not official staff.
I realize every prison has its rats but keeping WordPress.com from becoming a carceral state of tattletales is just as important as keeping the Spammers off the bandwidth.
There is a large difference between Spamming and Advertising. Advertising is viral, it comes in many forms, and it can be a text link instead of an image. All those buttons and doodads that lead to blogging affiliations feel just as ugly and Spammy to my eye as the Meebo logo and the new Song thing.
WordPress.com is, and should be, about making money — it is a .com and not a .org site. We can now pay for domains, CSS and storage space, so for many, they are already “paying” for their WordPress.com hosting in their minds and adding other revenue streams for bloggers and for WordPress.com is a natural evolution of the service. It will and must and should happen.
A sidebar PayPal “Donate Now” button is forbidden now, but I’d bet dollars to donuts a WordPress.com-sponsored widget that says “Donate Credits Now” would get fantastic play and popularity for many bloggers on WordPress.com. I hope that gets offered tomorrow.
Finally, I will double down and say in a year, the ongoing din in the forums from so many who say, “If you want to advertise, go to WordPress.org” will be spun on its ear to say, “If you want an ad-free blog, go to WordPress.org where you’re totally control of the experience.”
December 17, 2006 at 4:25 pm
December 17, 2006 at 5:10 pm
Comments
Youtube and such. Yes they are ads but until we have product placement Youtube ads and money to slide them in here (which would undoubtedly be stamped on) then I don’t see that as much of an issue. Such a development would not go unnoticed by bloggers.
Reporting blogs in a “telling tales” fashion already happens. Every blog is checked and if it’s good then we ignore them. I would hope they realise that the blog still existing means it’s good by us. If we had a persistent offender then I would have no problem with talking to them about that.
A Paypal donate button is fine
I have no idea how to link that though because the code Paypal give is not allowed as it has scripting.
How the ads will happen is important and as the service develops I want to be clear about what is and is not allowed. The problem is – and part of the solution is – that it will be interpreted by someone using their judgement. As such I cannot be clear. As soon as you draw a line it gets blurred. As soon as you draw a line you get people deciding for themselves and calling you out when you do not meet their expectations. Letter of the law, spirit of the law is somewhere in here.
In the end though it’s still about keeping this domain clean. I have no problem with people blogging anywhere and hoping for clicks. I have a huge problem with copywriters, keyword stuffers and outside links to drive traffic. I think there is a difference between a creative, vibrant and diverse blogging community and one that is overridden by the scammers and spammers.
There will always be those that want pure environments be that in blogging or any other community (online and off) but there is only so much you can do. They have an equal voice and it is important to balance views no matter how they are expressed.
As for what to report – if you think it’s out of the ordinary, report it. 9 times out of 10 you will get a reply saying either “Thanks it has gone” or “It’s staying and here is why”.
December 17, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Hi Mark!
I don’t envy your position at all, but I do find the Spam blogs and Scrapers are really obvious and icky: There’s no question they should be gone.
Like our Supreme Court said about obscenity — “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it” — so, too is the definition of the Spam/Scraper blogs — “I don’t have to define it because anyone who sees it knows it’s Spam.”
You can have an advertising-rich site and hosting program without Scraping or Spamming and the sooner WordPress.com moves to that advertising-rich model – that’s what we should all expect anyway for exceptional and FREE hosting and if we don’t expect that then we’re selfish and naive — and if there’s a way to share revenue with users, all the better.
I can’t wait for a “Donate Credits” button widget!
December 17, 2006 at 5:48 pm
P.S. –
I hate how this fun holiday theme doesn’t allow space between paragraphs in comments!
Where are the paragraph police when you need them?!!
December 17, 2006 at 11:06 pm
Ahhh… paragraph breaks…
December 18, 2006 at 6:01 am
I accidently clicked on my own comment as spam. Now whenever I visit another wordpress blog, my comments do not show up, even on my own blog. Only until an administrator can physically approve my posting, can it be seen.
I have despammed my own comments 5 times, but akismet still sorts my ID as spam.
What do I have to do to undo my mistake?
December 18, 2006 at 10:08 pm
@Mark
Some observations:
(1) The only people in the wordpress community with the authority to suspend or delete blogs are staff like yourself and that is how it should be.
(2) The kind of insecurity that leads any blogger to develop paranoid suspicions about fellow bloggers watching them would probably benefit from professional treatment. We bloggers are all watchers being watched and some might even say that in an uncensored environment watching other bloggers is what blogging is about.
(3) In any playground those little boys and girls who tend to become targets for gang interest are usually passive-aggressive manipulators and cry babies who suck up to authority figures. Indeed some might say leaving a trail of fawning posts behind is a demonstration of character weakness that invites exposure and attack.
(4) The kind of thinking that labels those who report spammers and sploggers as rats and tattle tales is utterly perverse. As a person who has reported spammers and sploggers to you and has only had a teeny tiny minority of them come back as being “okay”, I think any implication that those who report anomalies as you requested us to do, are rats, cranks or tattle tales points to a cognitive disorder.
(5) Obviously, the real rats are the spammers and sploggers and the bloggers who find their hidey holes and report them to you are doing the whole wordpress community a service. I will most assuredly continue to report any unusual blogging anomalies I run into to you and will actively encourage others to do likewise.
(6)
I have every confidence that Matt, yourself and all the members of the Automattic team are capable of coming up with a workable way of introducing tasteful advertising on paid accounts, while still remaining true to the open source tradition, and to Matt’s statements that there will always be free blogging available at wordpress.com.
Thanks for inviting dialogue on this subject.
January 16, 2007 at 12:05 am
@timethief
The *Open Source Tradition* has nothing – but absolutely nothing AT ALL – to do with advertising paid or otherwise. Tosh.