del.icio.us spammers are like neighbors who pee in your hottub
You read that right. I think del.icio.us spammers are rude and despicable. I’m pretty much married to del.icio.us at this point, and not likely to change to a new service (read: please don’t evangelize your favorite del.icio.us alternative), so I’m hoping that del.icio.us will make some strides in helping users filter out the spam.
There is, of course, the antisocial feature, which allows you to eliminate certain users from certain views but, to my knowledge, it’s of no use when you just grab the RSS feeds. For instance, I’m a big user of the feed for the ‘business‘ tag. These clowns have been peeing in my hottub and I don’t like it. And that’s not even all of them–just the ones I tagged real quick. Judging from the timing and the names of the junk they’re throwing into the ‘business’ tag, it’s probably some kind of ‘bot or something.
I’m not sure how del.icio.us can solve this, but I don’t like it when people complain to me but don’t offer alternatives, so I won’t do that. Here are a few potential solutions from a quick one-man, non-geek brainstorm:
- Implement a Craigslist-style "mark this as spam" flag. Any user with a certain percentage of their posts flagged as spam, or an absolute number flagged as spam within a certain short timeframe, would be suspended for a week or two. Not a big deal, since accounts are so easy to set up, but it would provide a deterrent.
- Another option might be to expand the antisocial feature so that when I subscribe to feeds, I don’t see anything from the users I have in my antisocial filter.
- A third option might be allowing users to flip a switch in their accounts that prevent them from seeing other users who’ve had a certain percentage of bookmarks as spam (like #1).
I don’t know what the “right” solution is, but I’m pretty sure that leaving things the way they are isn’t a good strategy. I don’t want to see del.icio.us change too much. The ease of setting up a new account is awesome, but there’s gotta be a way to systematically (and organically) weed out spammers.
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POSTED IN: customer service, web/tech
11 opinions for del.icio.us spammers are like neighbors who pee in your hottub
Romerican
Apr 9, 2006 at 11:23 pm
The third option sounds great, particularly if they had some kind of threshhold setting a la Technorati. I think having this tool with that kind of flexibility would give you the opportunity to filter out the spammers at the risk level you want to take while providing someone else a different choice, which minimizes the chance of holy wars (marking some ideology you don’t care for as spam).
drk
Apr 10, 2006 at 3:02 am
If people socially tagged spam and del.icio.us allowed searches like “business -spam” - then the spam would be filtered out.
I like the threshold idea where by you could set a spam threshold according to how many users have tagged it as spam - then the whole plus or minus spam parameter becomes more analog.
Just a stupid thought for the day ….
alex
Apr 10, 2006 at 4:34 am
Overall categories like “business” or “mobile” are likely to get spammed. The more specific the tag is and the less it sounds like a real word, the more relevant the results will be. For instance, the tag “mososo” (mobile social software) should be more relevant and less spammed than the tag “mobile”, if you’re looking for mososos.
Another way to get better results is to sort by ‘popular’, as in:
http://del.icio.us/popular/business
Even so, spam filtering might be a good feature … and it works on Craigslist ;)
Jason Pettus
Apr 10, 2006 at 5:31 am
And of course, another option you could implement right away is to use more specific search terms; the more specific the term, in fact, the less spam you’ll get back. (Of course, it’s less results altogether as well; that’s the drawback.) Instead of setting up a feed for ‘business,’ you might want to try one more specifically concerning what you’re seeking - marketing, leadership, entrepreneurs, etc.
Bren
Apr 10, 2006 at 5:37 am
Yeah, I know greater specificity will reduce spam, but I prefer the broad sweep because (ie, ‘business’ tag) because it lets me see the edges of what people are tagging ‘business’. In other words, more specific tags don’t usually show the weird and interesting stuff (which often doesn’t pop up in the ‘popular’ tag, either). The downside is that there’s too much spam mixed in there, pretending to be weird and interesting ‘edge’ stuff.
Jason Pettus
Apr 10, 2006 at 8:12 am
Well, sure, I agree with that; that’s why it’s also partly up to all of us as del.icio.us users to start using tags in smarter ways. I try to give as comprehensive a list of specific, related tags as possible, when bookmarking something at my own del.icio.us account [http://del.icio.us/jasonpettus]; I try to think of it as a tiny little blog of its own, which is why I try giving good desecriptive summaries as well. The more that users do this, the more reliable (and even preferable) it will be to use more specific tags, and the less we’ll have to rely on general tags to begin with.
Ben
Apr 10, 2006 at 8:55 am
There are some beta services out there that can filter your feeds. A lot of the del.icio.us spam I’ve seen have tags that are completely unrelated to the tags I subscribe to (i.e. woman, sex, and so on). You could simply filter out any RSS item that contains one of those words.
Trip (guest)
Apr 11, 2006 at 6:55 am
Have never used del.icio.us but inn the cleanest boards and newsgrupes I’m a member of, anyone posting spam is banned right away. Zero tollerance policie would be the way to go I think.
Trip, norway
Ben
May 23, 2006 at 2:48 pm
Put a fence up around your pool. Make it electrically charged. This should prevent your bad neighbors. Or maybe just get a dog.
drk
May 24, 2006 at 1:28 am
Anyone seen the “Spam Blog Search Engine” at splogspot.com?
If we could get a list of splogs marked as SPAM imported into del.icio.us then - no matter how hard the splogers try and promote their robo-splogs with tag spam the word SPAM would clearly show up in the tag listing …
just another stupid thought for the day …
btw - splogspot is brilliant because it sucks dollars from splog sites by stuffing the splogs into contexts with adwords that the splogspot creaters are harvesting while everyone ignores the sblogsites … brilliant!!!
Pete Morgan
May 25, 2006 at 4:21 pm
delicious could simply charge $10 per annum. Shock horror a business model.