MindComet

My public declaration to fight SPAM

Spammers are everywhere. And without a doubt, they are the anti-midas, turning everything they touch into another 4-letter word that’s not “gold”.

Take for example, Twitter trending topics. It’s s a feature that is ripe for spam and in my opinion is now almost completely useless because of spammers. Twitter lists, probably one of the smartest platform features that Twitter has rolled out, is already littered with spammers. My DM stream is now useless. And I’m constantly pruning my blog comments for Viagra and phentermine offers, neither of which I need.

So here’s what I am doing. This is my public declaration of what I’m going to do to combat spam.

All blog comments are going to require approval by me

I honestly dread this. To me, it’s really annoying when you post a comment and your told that it’s awaiting moderation. However, at this point, I’m at my wits end. I could implement Captcha or get really elegant and use Mollom, but I just don’t have the time. Moderation is the most effective solution given my already busy workload.

I’m pruning my Twitter following list.

I was for quite some time a reciprocal guy. You follow me, I follow you. This stopped a few months ago, however, because of the practice, my following list if pretty large. That is going to change, no matter how long and arduous a process it is.

DM me a crap/spam message and you will be unfollowed.

I’m not even looking at my DM stream anymore, but that will change. Nuff said. You’ve been warned.

View Comments

Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Nov. 17, 2009

Twitter’s trending topics is a spammers dream

Twitter’s API is a double edge sword. On one hand, it’s enabled hundreds, if not thousands of Twitter apps to spring up and has provided a mechanism to morph the platform into some really neat and useful tools. On the other hand, the simple and open API allows programmers to easily build and manage spam bots. The place is littered with them.

To their credit, Twitter is has been pretty aggressive in their fight against spam. This is not only good for Twitter, but given the full court press from Facebook, it’s a MUST DO.

This brings me to the Trending Topics feature of Twitter. A mechanism that allows anyone to inject their message into a filtered, yet public, feed based on a keyword with the link to that feed being displayed prominently on a user’s homepage and the Twitter homepage. That is a spammers dream come true, served up nicely with a side of brown butter sauce by Twitter (who some say is drowning in spam).

Check out this snapshot of a trending topic today, “AT&T”:

Everything outlined in red is spam.

I’m sorry, but this is just ridiculous. Over 50% of the posts are spam. I’m asking myself, “What’s the value here? And how is this useful?“ Given Twitter’s fight against and problem with spam, why would they keep this feature around?

My advice to Twitter: Remove trending topics altogether. It’s quickly becoming an unused feature, that is, if you’re an actual human.

View Comments

Posted by Jeremy Hilton on Sep. 23, 2009