Comments on: MyBlogLog Spam Getting Worse? I’d Say So.

By: Jason Bates - Lushable.com

Jason Bates - Lushable.com — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:20:28 +0000

MyBlogLog is a very good resource and no one likes spam

By: techipedia | tamar weinberg’s blog of stuff » Blog Archive » Spamming Social Networks is a No-No

Fri, 22 Jun 2007 01:23:40 +0000

[...] the other hand, are only friending up people who are obviously female. And let’s not forget MyBlogLog spam, though it’s gotten much better lately, and Orkut [...]

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:47:27 +0000

Claude, thank you for the clarification. I never figured that you were responsible at all and hope that my post never implied such. I’m sorry that this happened and to all the parties involved.

By: claude

claude — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:22:01 +0000

Blogmemes is not responsible for the hack which occurred this weekend via the Mybloglog Web service.
The Mybloglog account of one of the network’s members was pirated without his knowledge.
We do not yet know why or who might be responsible.
It is not in line with the network’s code of ethics nor in its interest to proceed in this manner and serves only to discredit our community.
We are currently suffering many spam attacks on our Web sites, which we are combatting as much as possible.
We thank the mybloglog team for having now corrected this problem.

We are currently trying to answer all those who have written to us, to explain the situation to them.

Claude
co-founder of the blogmemes network

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:29:35 +0000

Hey Eric, thanks. I think it’s a great first step!

I definitely would still want to see communication flowing, so hiding the unnecessary stuff would be ideal while still allowing the “noise” (since it’s sometimes still perfectly legitimate communication). This would be a refreshing change for sure and I’m ready to embrace it!

By: Eric Marcoullier

Eric Marcoullier — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 04:57:15 +0000

Tamar — When you get a moment, I would appreciate it if you looked at the blog post on MyBlogLog’s blog that reviews this whole weekend as well as our plans moving forward. Your feedback would be much appreciated. http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/weekend_spamtac.html

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 04:16:13 +0000

Thanks, Scott. My email didn’t alert me to your reply, so my apologies for not responding to you on this earlier!

I know that the nofollow links are there, but it only goes so far. It all comes down to what people see versus what the search engines do. The pink highlights in my screenshot do show that the links are nofollowed, but people without the plugin I use don’t know that (without viewing the source). Not all bloggers or MyBlogLog community members understand the whole benefit to nofollow, and they will see it as only one thing: spam.

At the end of the day, it seems that spammers really don’t care that their links are nofollowed or not. Heck, some of the spam messages my Akismet filter catches even have embedded nofollow links in them! I think that these spammers would rather gain exposure to raise awareness and interest than gain search rank from the search engines. Their posting on a huge community like BoingBoing gets these URLs in front of the eyes of however many people see the message posting until it’s deleted. I’m guessing that this is what matters most to these guys. Search rank, while important, is irrelevant to them in this capacity.

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:24:03 +0000

Sorry that I’ve been slower than normal in getting back to you. Todd @ MBL said it right: we need both walls (software) and laws (a TOS). We’re working hard on both and never feel like we’re far enough along. On thing on the Boing Boing community — all of our comments now have no-follow tags, so it does the spammers no good vis-a-vis Pagerank. We’re working to get the word out as we can.

By: Tamar Weinberg

Tamar Weinberg — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 06:23:52 +0000

Yep, thanks Jason. I informed Scott because he’s answered these previous concerns so quickly. I hope that those guys are able to clamp down on the spammers soon!

By: Webomatica

Webomatica — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 05:57:19 +0000

Hi – thanks for the heads up. I was also invited to co-author blogmemes but didn’t agree. I think this is pretty annoying but I’m still hopeful MyBlogLog will clamp down on blatant spam. It’s a bit sad to see that once a service starts taking off, the spammers get right in there!