Google Reacts to Splogs

labnol writes "Recently, Mark Cuban of Icerocket made the accusation that Blogger is by far the worst offender when it comes to Spam Blogs. Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam and another feature called Flag As Objectionable where users can report blogs with questionable content. Google appears to be listening."

Comments

I can see it now..

[pickyouupatnine]

.. Blogger getting bombarded by all sorts of "Questionable Content" flags from all sorts of extremely left / right / PC people ... soon they won't be able to keep up w/ the flags and will just turn off the feature.. :-/

Re:I can see it now..

[svkal]

Actually, this probably won't be too much of a problem if they base their system on ratios rather than individual complaints, which I assume they will given the huge number of individual flaggings that will necessarily take place.

The ratio of flaggings to unique visitors in a given timeframe will generally be higher for spam than controversial opinions. This is because people are more likely to report sites that will actually be deleted, instead of pointless political demonstrations to a one-man audience of some random Blogger employee, and because there is no significant number of unique visitors to a spam site that "agree" with the site's content(as there generally is for a political blog).

So, for normal circumstances, having an employee periodically go through the sites with the highest flagging ratios will give pretty good results.

Now, one could also expect campaigning, i.e. higher-traffic sites directing their audience to report lower-traffic sites with "undesirable opinions", but this could only be done for a manageable number of sites. These, after being inspected to make sure that they actually are not spam, could be flagged with an 'innocent' flag by the employee, exempting them from further inspection(after all, political blogs aren't likely to suddenly turn into spam blogs).

Re:I can see it now..

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better yet, just silently dump the marks from flagged accounts. They don't know they've been flagged, their objections are just dropped, and they continue blisfully ignorant, without registering a new blog.

Indian image-word-verification workers

[SuperBanana]

Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam

I once spoke with the VP of a company that was merging with the company I was doing contract work for (both companies were very small, so we had a lunchroom chat).

He revealed that there were a number of "email blast" (ie email spam outsourcers) that were happy to have dozens of Indian employees on staff ready to do the image-word verification and reply-to-this-email-to-be-whitelisted emails many think-they're-super-smart people had set up.

Why does anyone think the "illegitimate" spammers don't do exactly the same thing? Especially when, at $5/hr (about what US min wage is, I think) 5 seconds of effort (an overestimate, most likely, after you've been doing it for an hour) works out to about 2/3rds of a CENT...and that has the potential to reach hundreds of people before someone flags it? ONE worker could do 720 an hour...

Re:Indian image-word-verification workers

[learn fast]

What you say may be true but it certainly isn't an argument against adding this kind of verification. If you make it more costly to do, it will happen less.

What they really ought to do is use a Bayesian classifier to tell them which blogs are spam and which aren't.

Re:Indian image-word-verification workers

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! What a waste of money.

Real spammers set up free porn websites, and simply pass through the image for verification to their users for their own 'verification'. Why pay people to verify you, when you can make money off of advertisements from some third rate porn site, and have people voluntarily verify you?

*Blogger* is the worst offender in blog spamming?

[John Jorsett]

That's like saying convenience stores are the worst offenders in armed robbery. Surely the offender is the perpetrator, not the victim.

Re:good for google

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a splog = spam blog. Splog != comment spam. So while this helps reduce comment spam (a *separate* problem), it is the flag option that will help reduce splogs

Re:Can Google Solve the LJ_Abuse Problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Google address a problem with a blog service they don't own?

If you don't like LJ's policies, take your business elsewhere.

Judging by most of the people who have LJ's, I'd say there isn't much you'd be leaving behind.

So what happens when Rush Lambaugh gets flaged?

[Herschel Cohen]

Upon reading some of his comments verbatim it is shocking how inarticulate and rambling he is. Seems reasonable to me to label him as radio SPAM - he certainly has the figure for it.

How difficult is it for Google?

[SilentReallySilentUs]

Is it really that difficult for Google? In addition to the website caches, they have the complete Deja archive at their disposal to train any kind of learning software. Plus, this problem is already solved in Gmail. I agree it hurts when you just spent a few hours writing a blog and the first message you get is "Wow that is really nice! I will read it again. Please see my mortgate site here ..."

Accessible?

[tepples]

Word Verification can be enabled or disabled by the blog author.

But anybody who turns it on is likely to run afoul of the Rehabilitation Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and/or foreign counterparts.

Re:'flag as objectionable' - what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell me that there aren't blogs who deserve to be flagged.

http://ilovetsunamis.blogspot.com leaps to mind.

Re:What about 'nofollow'?

[MySchizoBuddy]

not to mention that its bad PR for google to have sblogs. If i was running a blogging service I would do that too. I guess now spammers can move over to MSN spaces.

A lot of these words are genuine

[Julian Morrison]

Both of those words you mentioned apply to phenomena that never existed before. You could call them "serial public editorial" and "prerecorded automatically downloadable digital radio" but your jaw would get tired. In fact, the best circumlocution would still miss corner cases which are definitely "blogs" and "podcasts". That's what I take as proof positive that a new word was necessary.

On the other hand, a lot of neologizing, particularly around "spam", seems to delight in sounding scatological. I wish people would think first - the last thing modern english needs is more deliberate ugliness.

Re:Can Google Solve the LJ_Abuse Problem?

[patternjuggler]

If you don't like LJ's policies, take your business elsewhere.

This sort of comment comes up repeatedly- "don't warn other people about a bad service, just shut up and find some other service"- how is that supposed to work?

Capitalism works by consumers having necessary information about a product or service before they buy it or invest time in it, not after. The way to have reliable information about a product is to hear from people who did actually use it and are satisfied or unsatisfied- so publicly declaring on slashdot that a service is bad is a good way for others to make informed decisions.

You're right that the typical slashdot user has little use for LJ or the people who use it, but the grandparent poster does raise the important issue of censorship which is relevant to all blog servers, forums, page hosts, etc. on the internet.