Spam blogs are destroying tag surfing
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I just hit tag surfer and spent way more time notifying wordpress about spam blogs than I did tag surfing. They EVERYWHERE lately. Is anybody else working on getting these assholes off wordpress? They seem to be generated automatically, they’re coming in so thick and fast.
I sent a suggestion to support asking if there could be some sort of filter for posts with nothing but links – think it’ll work?
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Staff are right on top of acting on spam blog and splog reports. They are after them 24 hours per day. You will find that Matt even referred to the numbers in his last monthly update. Last month they killed 41 thousand splogs http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/09/06/august-wrap-up-2/
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It’s a frickin’ epidemic. There has to be some sort of way to automatically zap them. I mean NOBODY posts long lists of links expecting to be taken for anything other than a spam dump. There must be some way to filter these out without affecting real bloggers.
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Just hit tag surfer again. Not even going to bother flagging them all, there’s so many. What’s the point of having this function if the spammers are going to clog it up?
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If I am not mistaken, the tag surfer is a feature that is still a ‘work in progress’. Staff would be aware of the splogs and I wouldn’t be surprised if something is not in the works to fix this issue already.
Trent
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I posted nothing but links in a post yesterday and I’m not a spammer. Link blogging is a valid use for a blog, which is why it’s so important that some real human being on staff check things over before nuking them. I know there are a lot of spam blogs out there, and I generally turn in a half dozen or so every time I go surfing. If they keep getting nuked, they’ll try another service.
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I just report them whenever I see them. I think the tagging system is great because it means that these blogs become noticeble and the real bloggers can report them.
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@raincoaster
I couldn’t find any post of yours that remotely resembles the long, long lists of links you find in spam blogs. Can you leave a link here?I think the reason leaving it up to people won’t work is that the spammers produce them faster than humans can stamp them out.
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As far as I know, they can’t automate production of WordPress.com blogs, so presumably 1.75 million people able to report them should outnumber the spammers. I’ve twice kilt off networks of rape porn spammers; sure, it was annoying when they came back, but I just reported them again and Mark or whoever axed them. There’s a sense of satisfaction in that.
This is my link post; you’re right, I’d forgotten I’d added other stuff to it:
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Do you believe there is an effective automatic technological way to apprehend them? I don’t this so. But I’m not a geek so perhaps there is something that would work.
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No automatic technology is as good as a set of eye attached to a reasonably intelligent mind. By the time you include all the “if then” statements necessary so it does a reasonable job, you have something the size of Vista. And then they just figure out a way around it anyway.
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Good points, but then again, how does Askimet filter out the spam comments? Surely an application of the same technology could be put to use filtering out the spam blogs. I’m no techie either, and I don’t want to come off like “they’ll think of something” but it just makes sense to me that since Askimet already does such a good job with one thing, why not the other?
As for the 1.75 million, there has to be more people involved in actually deleting them.
Since they’re unmistakable when you come across them, why can’t trusted wordpress.com bloggers be given permission to zap them on sight without first having to notify as spam in the first place? I’d volunteer to be one of them. -
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Wow, you’re up late! ;-)
Just went tag surfing again – ugh. After 10 spam notifications I gave up. I’ve told myself I’ll do my bit and notify 10 a day, despite the zero fun involved. I’d get more satisfaction if the application showed the blog disintegrating into a billion pixels – or melting, a sampled scream from Psycho along for the ride.
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Yeah, I’d like to see some form of Akismet to look at posts on submittal/save. If there’s 50 hyperlinks and no text, then there’s a good chance it’s spam. Especially, if there’s no other posts on the blog or if all of the blog posts have also been flagged.
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If you’d still like to look around blogs, I find that blog surfer has far fewer issues than this, because spammers love tags, so they’re overrepresented in the tag surfer. Not a solution, but a workaround.
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That’s a good workaround that requires you to enter a url into the Blog Surfer rather than entering a tag as you do in the tag surfer.
P.S. Spammers and sploggers love using the tags and I love reporting them. :)
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