Monty Python - Infamous spam sketch

Do you remember the “Spam” sketch from Monty Python?

You know the one I mean – Where Eric Idle and Graham Chapman are trying to order breakfast, but the waitress (Terry Jones) keeps pushing spam on them. It seems like every dish contains something they want, but covered with spam. Well, sometimes that’s how I feel about soLinkable.

I know there’s great content on here, but the spam overshadows everything. The Queued section typically looks like this:

*spam*, *spam*, *spam*, *spam*, *spam*, GREAT ARTICLE, *spam*, *spam*, *spam*, and *spam*.

For every few great submissions, I’ll delete almost 100 spammy ones. For every few great users, there are 100 spammy ones. It’s a constant battle, and if I don’t do something to gain the upper hand I’m going to need extra moderators. So, in an attempt to fight back, here are a few of the recent measures we’ve implemented at soLinkable:

1) Unverified users have restrictions on what they can do with soLinkable.

What is a verified user? A verified user is a user who has been with soLinkable for a few days, submitted some good links, voted a few times, and made a couple of legible, thoughtful comments. By this point, their Karma will have risen above a set threshold (25 points), making them verified users. Simple enough.

Until a user becomes verified, they’ll be bound by the following restrictions:

• Each link submission must pass a reCAPTCHA test – Pretty self-explanatory, this is to stop bots from submitting.
• One submission per 24 hours – Even if a link gets deleted, the user must wait 24 hours before a new submission can be made.
• NoFollow attribute to links on any submissions in the Queued section. If it gets promoted, the NoFollow tag will come off this link. Once the user becomes verified, all NoFollow tags will be completely removed for all links – promoted or queued (including links submitted before the user became verified).
• Each submission is checked against Askimet – Very similar to how Askimet is used for blog comments: If Askimet tells us it’s spammy, then we put it aside for a moderator to check. The moderator can then decide if the submission should be placed into the queue or simply deleted.

tl;dr: A verified user is anyone with more than 25 Karma, and has FULL use of the site with NO restrictions. Verified = No restrictions. Unverified = Restrictions.

2) Ghost Bans

This is similar to the ghost ban used by Reddit. It’s a little underhanded, but any legitimate user will never run into it. It’s used to keep a banned user thinking they’re still submitting content. So while they can view their content, nobody else will ever see it.

I think this is one of the most effective measures, and best of all it’s completely automatic. Too many submissions get deleted without offering anything valuable to the community? BAM! Ghost ban.

A few of you may be worried, thinking you could be banned and not even know it. As long as you’re an active, participating member, there’s nothing to worry about. Make a few comments, vote on a few stories, and you’ll never run into any problems.

3) Deleted stories are only viewable by the submitter

If a story gets down voted by a majority of users, it will eventually be deleted. Once this happens, it will no longer display for anyone except the original submitter – They will continue to still see it normally.

The idea is to hide that it has been deleted, so the spammer won’t realize and re-submit. It’s incredibly frustrating to delete the same “Cheap SEO Development India” link over and over, day after day. And even if they do realize, the link info is stored for 30 days so the system will tag the submission as a duplicate story.

Conclusion

Whew. That seems like a lot of restrictions and dirty tricks. Believe me, it was a tough decision to make. I don’t like limiting what people can do or heavy moderating, but unfortunately I don’t have any other choice. The fight will go on, and I’ll continue to delete as much spam as required to make soLinkable a better place.

And as I always point out, there’s a real person behind soLinkable – So if you feel as though you have been unfairly targeted, send us a quick email. I’ll continue to monitor how effective these measures are and make changes as necessary. I’m very open to any ideas or suggestions.

Finally, If there are any regular users who may be interested in a moderator role, send me an email through our contact form. I can’t offer monetary compensation (at least not yet), but I can offer a link on the “About Us” page (under your bio). And with constant use of soLinkable, you’ll also (hopefully) increase your readership and can easily make it into the “Top Karma” sidebar list, giving you a link on the main page.

Thanks again for your support – It’s all of you who make this fun and worth the effort.

censorship, spam, upgrade

Have any of you tried to use the soLinkable search before? If not, consider yourself lucky. It sucked. I mean, REALLY sucked.

Thankfully, that’s starting to change. We’ve slowly been implementing upgrades to our search algorithm with the goal of eventually developing a search function that actually allows you to find what you’re looking for (crazy, I know).

The first thing you’ll notice are the new options available. You can now drill down to make your search a little more specific: category, where, when, and sorting method are all available filters. But don’t let these major design changes fool you – There were also plenty of improvements behind the scenes. We made significant upgrades, giving us better search results, in less time, with fewer calls.

Let me take you through a simple search as an example. Say we were looking for a specific Google Maps post which is ~10 months old.

First off, I’m not sure what category it would be under. Maybe Internet, but maybe technology – I don’t know. So, I’ll just leave it as “All Categories”.

Next, I know “Google Maps” will be mentioned in either the title or content, so I’ll choose “Title and Description”. Simple enough. To get the most relevant search result first, I’ll sort “By Relevance”. And finally, it’s about 10 months old, or, “<365 Days”, which represents “less than 365 days”. This leaves me with the following search query:

Hitting enter I will see the following results…

I see it! 10 Top Overlooked Features of Google Maps – Exactly what I was looking for!

We’re not done yet, there are still many more upgrades to come. However we decided to offer the first batch of changes sooner due to the general crappiness of the search functionality.

But don’t just take my word for it, Try it out yourself and see the difference!

bug, fix, search