Ma.gnolia Blog: A Dirty Shame

Comment: John Lascurettes

2008-02-01T10:31:14-08:00

Good article. One tiny correction:

If 75% of all new accounts are spammers (wow!), then for every one real new user there would be *three* new spammer or spambot accounts, not four.

If it's indeed four spammers to every one authentic joiner, then 80% of all new accounts are spammers.

Comment: Larry Halff

2008-02-01T11:44:45-08:00

Hey John,

Thanks for pointing out the math mismatch. It was a case of rounding in different directions, so I've updated the post with more accurate numbers.

Comment: otis

2008-02-02T15:26:22-08:00

(this is Otis from Simpy - another social bookmarking service)

Larry, good post.

I'm in the same situation, though the numbers you cite sounds a lot worse than what I *think* I see on Simpy. Knock on wood. I, too, have been meaning to talk about this more publicly.

My impression is that a good percentage of these people don't have a clue what they are doing, so one factor is education. For example, I have been meaning to modify the Simpy signup page to make it very explicit - "Looking for traffic? Click here" - and take people to the newly added FAQ entry about this: http://www.simpy.com/faq#useGuide

Even though we are in the same space, I am wondering if there is room for cooperation. I don't have (m)any concrete thoughts and wouldn't want to expose them here even if I did, but if you think we can suppress spam at least somewhat by cooperating, let me know.

Comment: Larry Halff

2008-02-02T22:11:39-08:00

Hi Otis,

Thanks for commenting. I agree completely that education is an important way to correct this sort of behavior, and that's an area we could substantially improvement. Your FAQ is a great example of this.

I'll keep you posted with our efforts and we'll see if we can maybe work together on this.

Comment: Frederik Van Zande

2008-02-04T15:29:15-08:00

Just thinking out loud here,

but is there no way to stop the API spamming ?
I haven't used the ma.gnolia API yet, but plan on using it.
is there no way to put a limit on the requests per API key, & if someone wants a higher amount of requests / day then they need to upgrade their API key (after you guys check it manually).
or maybe an additional requests limit on ip ?

more ideas :
- a report as spam button on pages with highly targeted keywords by spammers.
- some spam messages look like they'd never would get through a spam filter, try to include one ... automize the spam removal.
- are there some databases with spam-website urls ? block those.

Comment: Moni

2008-03-20T16:07:33-07:00

Good to hear the truth about these things. Thanks so much for this post! It's incredible to think the situation is statistically racked up like that -- at least everyone knows it's not their imagination!

Comment: Ken Kennedy

2008-03-20T19:10:00-07:00

Hmm...interesting post, Larry; thanks! I agree with the larger picture, but I'm wondering how you draw the line. In many cases, it's obvious, but I'm not 100% sure from reading your post how "aggressive" you want to be in preserving Magnolia's resources.

Case in point: after being inspired by Jon Udell in this excellent post: The blurred line between personal information management and publishing (View Details) , I began some time ago to "self-tag" all my own posts; first at delicious, now both here and there (for the time being, I'm still using both, though I'm leaning towards magnolia). I use the tags "kenkennedy" and "kenzoid" for my own posts (plus any other relevant categories).

I adore this concept; as Jon points out, tagging "in the cloud" provides me with improved results both in quality and breadth; I can do things (sorting, querying, API, etc.) here and at delicious that many blog tagging addons can't manage; and just as importantly, I can aggregate across many sites, blogs, comments, etc. It's great!

Now, I do this both for myself (for purposes of improved organization), and admittedly, because sites like delicious and magnolia give me a wider reach for my tagging. But I don't consider this spamming...honestly. I'm trying to add metadata to the cloud. It happens to be about me, but I tag FAR more things about other topics; I'm one category among many. Is that the difference?

How do you guys feel about this? Am I abusing the system? Please let me know; I really think the service is great, but if we're at cross-purposes here, I want to know early on. I don't want to be considered a "tagsploiter"! *grin*

Thanks so much for everything!

Comment: Larry Halff

2008-03-21T11:16:59-07:00

Hey Ken, thanks for commenting. You're definitely not a spammer, by any stretch.

Self-tagging is a great idea, and I do it myself here and in other places, like Flickr. Tagsploiters are looking to gather search hits or raise their results for keywords by purposely mistagging or overtagging for common search terms; not, to improve the quality of the metadata.

Comment: Ken Kennedy

2008-03-22T17:20:32-07:00

Thanks for the response, Larry. It makes perfect sense. I knew in my gut that there was a difference, but I couldn't articulate it at the time, so I figured I'd just ask the experts. *grin* The clarification regarding mistagging and overtagging brings it home; active, purposeful "poisoning" of the metadata well, as it were.

Thanks again. And thanks for what you're doing here...I'm really, really impressed with ma.gnolia. From the powerful APIs to the community tools, the forward-looking OpenID support, and even the performance. I'm totally impressed and appreciative.

Comment: Larry Halff

2008-03-24T10:23:37-07:00

Thanks for the kind words and encouragement, Ken!