The MyBlogLog Blog The source for all things MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog needs your help — what do we do (if anything) about spam?

MyBlogLog deals with spam on a daily basis.  In some cases, it's really easy.  When someone posts Nigerian or porn spam, it's pretty clear that the right thing to do is boot the user from the system and go about our day.  Simply put, if someone sends a bunch of messages to MyBlogLog members linking somewhere outside the system, they're gone.  But there's another kind of spam, and we're not really sure what to do about it.

A small percentage of our users try to drive traffic to their own communities (and eventually their own sites) by a) joining hundeds of communities, b) adding hundreds of contacts and/or c) sending out hundreds of messages asking people to check out their communities.

It's interesting how people respond.  Personnaly, I could care less if someone joins my communities or makes me a friend, but heaven forbid they send me an unsolicited message.  For other people, it's just the opposite -- they're fine with messages but they hate it if one of their only community members is an obvious plant.

However, most of these members are also the most engaged in MyBlogLog.  When you look at their profiles and communities they have dozens of messages, almost all uniformly positive.  People who click through seem to appreciate the attention and appear genuinely happy that somone took the time to interact with them.

So we're at a loss.  On the one hand, we have a vocal group of members asking us to stop letting people fish for traffic this way.  These people who want us to ensure that only high-quality connections are let through, either by banning the users or restricting their ability to post or just changing the whole framework of the communities.  Then there's the other group that actually like the random requests.

So we're putting it out there for you to discuss.  How big of a problem is this for you?  How would you like for us to address it?  You've been great at guiding us on other areas of feature development so
I can't wait to read what you bring to this challenge.

We are doing one small thing that we are doing in conjunction with this post.  We've added a "report as spam" button next to each message you receive.  If there's something that annoys you, click the button and let us know.  I don't care whether it's the biggest issue in the world or a minor annoyance.  I'd just like to get a better handle on what's bugging people before we try to respond with change.

Thanks for your input on this one.  It's a challenging problem and it will be fun to solve together.