The guys behind WordPress had the foresight and energy to create Akismet to help control blog spam, and the blogging world wouldn’t be the same without it. A popular web application like WordPress is a big target for spammers, since they can write bots to pump their spew into it. Akismet helps cut that problem down to size.
I was really pleased to see a cool site called StopForumSpam.com, created by Russ Jackson and helped along by Paul Lush. The idea of StopForumSpam.com is simple – make it easy for people to report spammers on their sites, so others can block them. It’s fast, free, easy to use, and I feel it can help control the damage caused by some of the worst offenders.
Over a half-million known spammers are already listed at StopForumSpam.com, and more are added every day. If you run a forum site you might want to take a look at the mods that are available for phpBB, vBulletin and simpleMachinesForum. There’s also an API available that is very easy to incorporate into your own application.
We liked StopForumSpam.com so much at DZone that we decided to adopt the site and provide hosting and support for it in our data center. Russ and Paul have been carrying the load all by themselves, and it’s a pleasure to be able to help them out in their worthy mission. StopForumSpam.com can’t solve the whole problem, but it can certainly be a piece of the solution. I hope it will be helpful to you!
As DZone becomes more popular with users, it also becomes more popular with spammers! This past week Matt and I worked on several new tools to help manage the ever-increasing flood of spam that DZone attracts. I think we achieved a breakthrough on a key issue.
It used to be the case that all new links were visible to all users, and we relied on spam detection and vigilant moderators to remove spam quickly. This put a ton of pressure on our excellent moderator team, however, since it required constant scrutiny of to keep the new links queue clean. As the rate of spam submissions increased, so did the probability that some of that spam would be sitting in the top of the new links queue for a while (and also in the new links RSS feed, even worse!) Far too often, this spam would pollute the new links queue.
Now, we have come up with a way to segregate nearly 100% of that spam into an active moderation queue BEFORE it ever reaches the eyes of the general DZone audience. The difference is remarkable, and you may have noticed that DZone’s new links queue is a lot cleaner and more interesting now. (Well, I guess the spam links to “Asian Sex Vacations” and “Top 10 Recipes for Healthy Desserts” were colorful in some respect, but not interesting to DZone readers!)
Since we deployed the changes a week ago, over 1000 links have been blocked outright, and none of them ever got in front of our readers. Additionally, we have new tools for the moderators to manage the active moderation very conveniently. In short, it has never been so easy to spot and kill spam. It’s almost unfair, like shooting fish in a barrel, but somehow I doubt very many of you will argue that we should be more lenient or merciful to spammers!
If you’d like to be part of the DZone moderator team, just get in touch with me at rick@dzone.com, and I’ll be happy to consider you for the role. It’s easy and fun. You’d be surprised how satisfying it feels to block these junk links and ban the vermin who submit them!
I noticed a tweet from @bigokro the other day saying “Spam has invaded DZone… I wonder how they’ll deal with it.” and it made me realize that most people thankfully have no idea how much spam gets submitted to DZone every day and how much effort we put into protecting you from it.
A quick check of the database showed that we have blocked over 70,000 spam links. We typically block 100 or more each day. In addition, there are thousands of users banned for spamming and tons of domains that are blacklisted so nobody can post links pointing to them. If not for those, the number would be a LOT higher than 70,000!
Here’s a short sample of the headlines we’re talking about. These were posted yesterday (along with many dozens of other fine examples.) I think you’ll get the idea pretty quickly:
- Free And Cute Babies Pictures
- Escort vip Madrid
- Madrid Escorts
- Carl Lewis: Olympic Medals through the Vegan Diet | Vegan123
- 10 Steps to Open Your Own Consulting Business and Work from Home.
- Ladat: Cures and Remedies
- looks like a unlimited bandwidth web hosting..cool site
- Free Laptops
- Leather bar stools
Just for fun, I exported a list of the 70,452 links (titles,dates and users – no urls) that have been blocked since we launched DZone. It’s just a zipped text file, but rather large (about 1.6 mb zipped.) Feel free to download it and have a look at the outrageous junk that “SEO Experts” and outright spammers think you need to know about. It’s good for a laugh, really it is!
Rick Ross
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