Fighting the Ugly Spam Monster
Greetings everyone.
I know that I've been absent for a while, but truth be told, I have been working on a better version of the site. Work just goes much more slowly these days than it did in the past. I simply have my hands in too many cookie jars at the moment.
However, work is progressing and I'm trying to be more diligent about getting this release finished, because I think that it is quite an improvement over the current site.
Now onto the topic at hand: SPAM
I hate it. You hate it. We all agree.
I've tried to leave Onxiam very "open" -- most notably in allowing people to add sites to the collective pool. However, spammers have been adding far, far too many bogus sites to Onxiam. It's gotten to the point that I simply cannot keep up. One quick look through the site and you'll see what I mean. Who knew that there was such a thriving online community for "SONY Laptop battery 088XX-2135".
I mean really, all of you Laptop Battery people...I just don't know what to say to you. You've just gone way, way too far. I've been struggling with the morality of "policing" Onxiam and deleting sites and deleting accounts. I don't want to spend my time censoring things, but I'm simply left with no other option at this point.
Onxiam was conceived out of a need -- a need to group my online names in one place that would be easy for my friends and family to find. Other people found it useful too, and that's great! But it was always meant to be a list of online communities, not spam keywords.
With that in mind, I am working on taking action to purge all of the sites and user accounts that have been deemed as spam.
This will greatly clear up the noise in the Onxiam database, and will allow me to actually focus some effort on developing features when I get free time instead of spending all of my free time fighting spammers.
Unfortunately, this also means that when I release the new version of the site, the "add a site" feature will be replaced with "request a site". This will allow me to catch spam upfront, before it floods the database and wreaks havoc all over Onxiam.
I'm sorry everyone has had to deal with all of the laptop battery garbage. It will be gone soon.
All the best,
-Kevin
I know that I've been absent for a while, but truth be told, I have been working on a better version of the site. Work just goes much more slowly these days than it did in the past. I simply have my hands in too many cookie jars at the moment.
However, work is progressing and I'm trying to be more diligent about getting this release finished, because I think that it is quite an improvement over the current site.
Now onto the topic at hand: SPAM
I hate it. You hate it. We all agree.
I've tried to leave Onxiam very "open" -- most notably in allowing people to add sites to the collective pool. However, spammers have been adding far, far too many bogus sites to Onxiam. It's gotten to the point that I simply cannot keep up. One quick look through the site and you'll see what I mean. Who knew that there was such a thriving online community for "SONY Laptop battery 088XX-2135".
I mean really, all of you Laptop Battery people...I just don't know what to say to you. You've just gone way, way too far. I've been struggling with the morality of "policing" Onxiam and deleting sites and deleting accounts. I don't want to spend my time censoring things, but I'm simply left with no other option at this point.
Onxiam was conceived out of a need -- a need to group my online names in one place that would be easy for my friends and family to find. Other people found it useful too, and that's great! But it was always meant to be a list of online communities, not spam keywords.
With that in mind, I am working on taking action to purge all of the sites and user accounts that have been deemed as spam.
This will greatly clear up the noise in the Onxiam database, and will allow me to actually focus some effort on developing features when I get free time instead of spending all of my free time fighting spammers.
Unfortunately, this also means that when I release the new version of the site, the "add a site" feature will be replaced with "request a site". This will allow me to catch spam upfront, before it floods the database and wreaks havoc all over Onxiam.
I'm sorry everyone has had to deal with all of the laptop battery garbage. It will be gone soon.
All the best,
-Kevin
posted by Kevin Poulsen at 7:57 AM
3 Comments:
Hey Kevin. That is great news - I just visited after a bit of a break to add some new identities, and spotted all of that stuff - good to hear it is going to be cleaned up :-)
Good luck.
Hello Kevin,
You're right it's outta control (obviously it takes time to police it too). What about some sort of moderation (as I'm seeing as I write this comment)?
Vimeo's not working either...
Cheers :)
Hi,
I only now discover your site, pretty cool idea. I'm wondering about the current status, can we have an update please?
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