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

Finally

[ImaLamer]

I've been writing to Blogger/Google about a lot of fake blogs for a while and I'm glad to see Flag as Objectionable come into play. After a while I just got tired of doing it and stopped.

Up until now there was nothing they or the surfer could do - good work Google.

Enough already!

[Julian Morrison]

Please neologize without sounding like you're spitting on the floor.

Re:Enough already!

[TheUz]

For people like me with a week vocabulary:

That should be weak, my friend.

A week is seven days. This post, correcting your misuse of the word, "week," is weak.

= )

Flag Roland! Oh please, oh please, oh please!

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't get much more spammish or objectionable than that!

Re:good for google

[croddy]

No, this is not about reducing spam in the comments on blogs. This is about reducing the number of blogs whose authors post only spam. The number of such blogs is enormous -- most counts put it between half and 2/3.

Lock the barnyard!

[Reaperducer]

Lock the barn. Hide you farm animals. The pigs are nervous.
This could lead to more cases like this one.

Slashsplogs

[mattjb0010]

Mark Cuban of Icerocket made the accusation that Blogger is by far the worst offender when it comes to Spam Blogs.

Mark Cuban of Icerocket, allow me to introduce you to Roland Piquepaille of Slashdot...

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..

[techno-vampire]

There's a way to keep people from using Mark as Objectionable to censor political opinions. You have to be logged in to mark, and the blog keeps track of who it is making the mark. Whoever owns the blog can go over the marks, remove any inappropriate ones and, if somebody's abusing the privilege, eject them. Of course, there has to be a way to keep them from simply signing up again, such as checking for a banned email address. Yes, I know how easy it is to create throw-away addresses, but it might slow them down a little.

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.

Re:I can see it now..

[nzkoz]

it might slow them down a little

No. It won't

They will keep coming and coming and coming until you give up, go home, cry uncle, take Prozac, get a regular day job to replace the one you quit when being an anti-spammer became your full-time job.

Blog spam will never die

Re:good for google

[Anonymous Coward]

The number of such blogs is enormous -- most counts put it between half and 2/3.

I'm not sure I'd call any number less than one "enormous".

Re:good for google

[ImaLamer]

This is about reducing the number of blogs whose authors post only spam. The number of such blogs is enormous -- most counts put it between half and 2/3.

Good thing it is being done too - I'd hate to be excluded from the other search engines because I've got a few blogs with Blogspot/Blogger. Gets rid of that whole "guilt by association" thing.

BTW: The 'flag as objectional' button hasn't shown up yet on any blogs I post to.

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:Does anybody really care...

[macklin01]

Distorted google rankings (and accordingly worsened search results), that's why. -- Paul

Re:good for google

[blinksilver]

Off the above link "We've just introduced the option to require word verification for comments. This option (off by default) gives bloggers a tool to prevent the automatic creation of comments by nefarious ne'er-do-wells (e.g. spammers). Features like comment captcha and flag as objectionable are not complete solutions to the problem of spam. But they are additional tools that can help address it." I may just be missing something but what is word verification about then if not to stop spammer (bots) from leaving unwanted comments?

Oh yeah

[dedazo]

Blogspot is overflowing with these. Take a look at this this for example(don't want to go there with IE, BTW), or this one or this one.

If you use the 'next blog' randomizing feature on blogs you'll see that roughly one out of five 'blogs' are nothing but link farms, worm repositories and bullshit like that.

And this has been going on for quite a while. We all know that Google has a fondness for indexing Blogger content rather quickly, and so do the spammers. It's about time the company did something about it.

Re:Oh yeah

[JimBobJoe]

Take a look at this this for example(don't want to go there with IE, BTW)

I have never wanted to go to a website so much after I saw that warning.

After I submit this post, I'm restarting Mozilla, as that site has caused it to memory leak worse than the Exxon Valdez.

Re:Oh yeah

[dedazo]

It has embedded images in the HTML - it uses the 'cid' format, whatever that is. I think it's a Microsoft thing.

Firefox kept asking me if I wanted to "launch the application".

Re:Oh yeah

[dedazo]

I'm not entirely sure how it works, but I'll tell you how I think it works...

Basically if you're using Blogger as a service and publishing through on your own server, it will index it every time you re-publish the index. That's what I think happens from observation and monitoring the Google cache. I might be wrong.

If you use the Blogspot service then you need at least *one* incoming external link to be indexed. A friend of mine created a blog there, and I linked to it from my blog published to my own server. Within a few days the "page rank" for his blog jumped from "not indexed" or zero to two. Most Blogspot blogs are not linked to from anywhere and so Google does not index them at all.

Take this with a grain of salt - it's just based on my observations over the past few months. It could be just a bunch of coincidences.

*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.

What about 'nofollow'?

[gregorio]

Does anyone remember that? Does Google remembers that? Why not 'nofollow' instead of annyoing distorted text confirmation procedures?

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.

Can Google Solve the LJ_Abuse Problem?

[Khyber]

Ahhh, but will Google solve the problem that LiveJournal has? The problem I'm talking about is the LiveJournal_Abuse team, which has always been made up of volunteers and will ban anyone on any whim for any reason, reasonable or not. I made a community called "DIERIAA" and the purpose of the community was to point people to cool free music. Within twenty minutes of having the community made it was shut down for "promoting the illegal piracy of music." And not one single post had even been made in the community. Will Google be able to solve a problem like that?

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.

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.

"Questionable Content"

[Drew Curtis]

I hope this isn't part of their Chinese firewall partnership, so they can remove dissenting blogs - one of the last bastions of effective political change.

Sounds great...except...

[FuturePastNow]

What happens when (I didn't say if) affiliates of _________ political party start "flagging as objectionable" blogs written by those they disagree with? What happens when religious wackos flag sex blogs as objectionable? TFA says Blogger tracks the number of times a blog is flagged objectionable and base their action on that, not that they review whether something is actually bad. This could be trouble.

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 ..."

Re:What unit is Cuban using?

[Anonymous Coward]

Consider that each relatively new (as most Splogs are) blog takes up on average 3 KB of space on a hard drive (size of average e-mail text spam, which is then uplaoded to Splog),

and based on the fact that Blogger.com uses Maxtor MX830HA hard drives with an average surface capacity of 300 MB per platter (x20 = 60 GB),

each platter being 212 tracks,

so each track holds 1.4 MB, and take the radius of 3 inches times 2pi to get circumference of approx 19 inches, which is 48 cm, or about 500 mm.

So you have 500 mm holding 1.4 MB, which means 0.0028 MB per mm, or 2.8 KB per mm.

So 1mm = ~ a single Splog.

Re:good for google

[badasscat]

No, this is not about reducing spam in the comments on blogs. This is about reducing the number of blogs whose authors post only spam.

Sheesh, I know it's de rigeur here to not read the article, but at least read the freakin' summary.

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

What part of that don't you understand?

And I say it's about time too. I have a (very unpopular, sporadically updated) blog on Blogger/Blogspot - linked above - and every single time I post an update I get at least 3 or 4 nearly instantenous spam comments. I have to check the next day and go through and delete them manually as it is now.

Of course, the really annoying thing is these are the only comments I ever get! But I guess that's to be expected with a blog that's updated approximately once every three months...

When is spam just a difference of opinion?

[Infonaut]

People are going to start reporting blogs with which they disagree as spam in an attempt to have it shut down.

That's not a far cry from some of the moderation I've seen here on Slashdot. Disagree with someone's opinion? Mod them down! In general human beings do not like to face things that make them uncomfortable, and coming face to face with opinions that are diametrically opposed to your own really freaks people out.

When I have mod points, I try to take care to only mod people down when I feel that they are engaging in personal attacks or other socially disagreeable behavior. I admit that it is difficult for me to mod up comments that are in opposition to my opinions, but if someone has argued a point well and isn't resorting to ad hominem attacks or perversions of fact, I can sometimes get past my biases and up-mod a post. The less important the issue being discussed, of course, the easier it is for me to up-mod an opinion with which I disagree.

I strongly believe that maintenance of a community that values diversity of opinion is important, both here on Slashdot and in the "real world." Unfortunately it requires effort to maintain community, and much of the communications technology we use today is making it easier and easier for us all to filter out that which we do not want to hear. Perhaps it's not an accident that political discourse in the United States has sunk to such a morass, devoid of any real substance.

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.

W3C: Inaccessibility of Visual Anti-Robot Tests

[tepples]

I can't really see a good reason to why Google has that new word verification feature off by default

Probably something to do with laws requiring companies to make their products accessible to people whose disabilities prevent them from seeing images. (Read More...) Turning on accessibility (that is, turning off word verification) by default means that liability for inaccessible blogs lies with the blog administrator, not with Google.

Wrong posting user

[iphayd]

This should have been posted by Roland Piquepaille.

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.

Blogger Addresses Flag Abuse Issue

[Sundroid]

Blogger has addressed the "Flag" abuse issue. From their own internal "Blogger Buzz" blog (http://buzz.blogger.com/), it says: "From a technical standpoint, we are able to detect when multiple votes come from the same source. We prevent against ballot box stuffing. But most importantly, we're not automatically removing content based on the flags. We're using the feedback from Blog*Spot readers to help assess what the community has noted as potentially objectionable. In the cases where objectionable content has been identified, the most common action is for the support team to 'delist' the blog. This simply means that the blog is not promoted in areas of blogger.com like Recently Updated - but it's still viewable on the web. The content is not blocked or removed in anyway when the blog is delisted."

So for those who are concerned that their "enemies" might use the "Flag" feature to attack their blogs, relax!

Re:Thank God for Wikipedia

[rve]

When i posted the link, it redirected to the page for 'Penis' !