Comments on: Mahalo Getting More Social by Leveraging Other Social Sites

By: Steven Bradley

Steven Bradley — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:57:13 +0000

Mahalo. Yawn.

By: Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:51:59 +0000

At this point, 50 people can most likely handle everything but as the project grows, I can definitely see a lot of people abusing this one, or at least trying to and getting away with it for a while, which will, of course, have a negative impact as far as user experience is concerned.

Alan Johnson

By: Nicole

Nicole — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:11:30 +0000

Looks liek a lot of people are going to try to misuse this. Lets hope their spam protection measures to live up to expectations. Blackhat marketers are mostly a step ahead.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 05:37:45 +0000

Well, when you require email validation AND you ban the links that folks are posting that REALLY helps a lot as well.

If I’m a spammer and I have to buy a new domain name/start a new blog over and over again I’m gonna probably give up.

Also, we can put a catchpa on the submit forms if a “spam storm” comes in.

We’ve got it covered.

The harder issue is folks coming in and making 50 good suggestions and THEN submitting a spammy site that looks like it’s good. Those are the super slick SEOs that we’re gonna have a harder time with!

By: Jordan McCollum

Jordan McCollum — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:55:38 +0000

Actually, lots of people that I know (including me) do ban by IP etc. But the vast majority of spam sent at the blogs that I write for comes from bots at a plethora of IP addresses, rather than actual people making multiple attempts from single IP addresses.

Blog spammers are getting smarter.

But like I said in the post, I can see that Mahalo probably won’t have a huge problem with spam for a while yet.

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 04:47:28 +0000

You can check for youself to see how much spam is getting in at the “user created stubs” category page at Mahalo here:

http://www.mahalo.com/Category:User_Created_Stubs

Nothing horrible is making it through, although some of the stuff is lame or “just ok.”

Our thought is we can watch these stub pages and either kill them over time if other folks don’t add to them, or we can beef them up if they are good.

Looks like we’re going to get 100-200 of these a day. That’s fairly easy for us to handle with one or two people. So, unless we get to like 10,000+ a day we’ll be fine.

Also, if we do get to 10,000+ a day we’ll have a really big service and be able to afford to expand the program.

Also, we can ban folks by IP, email address, and by URL. The reason why blog spam is such and issue is because a) people don’t require registration and b) people don’t ban IPs/URL/emails. If you do ban folks they give up quickly and find some other town to vandalize.

At least that’s what I learned at Weblogs, Inc.

best jason