News Source: http://stumbleupon.group.stumbleupon.com
Published: Dec 20, 2007 - 03:27 am
Story Found By: jeffquipp 1514 Days ago
Category: SEM
Great post by Stumbleupon staffer Joe Walp (on the Stumble blog) discussing how Stumbleupon deals with spammers, and in fact has its very own ’Sandbox Effect’.
7 Comments
Comments
Jeff, I saw this on Digg earlier this morning but it seems like it was already edited so I didn’t submit it to Sphinn... what did Joe Walp write about the ’Sandbox Effect’?
To be honest Maki, I briefed through it quickly when I saw it this am, thinking I’d come back to it later in the day for a more detailed look. I don’t trust what I remember ... it was early. Here’s what I’ve been able to pull from a Stumbler’s review of the page from this a.m. ... who captured some of the page’s contents before they were edited:"Another strategy that we’ve used on occasion is to allow the spammer to spend months futilely attempting to promote a garbage website before eventually banning that website. This tends to generate helpful word-of-mouth in spammer forums. Unfortunately, because most of the various sandboxed states aren’t visible to the general public, this leads to the incorrect impression that spamming is tolerated. The best ways via which a concerned citizen can inform the sandboxing process are: 1. Rate garbage content thumb-down. 2. Mark spam reviews as unhelpful (Helpful->No). 3. Report spam messages that arrive in your inbox. 4. Flag suspected spammer accounts via the ’Flag as Spammer’ feature."Interesting huh? Stumbleupon themselves refer to it as Sandboxing. Its clear their intent is to frustrate spammers. Can’t really blame them there. That was the most interesting part of the article that I can recall from this am.Jeff
Well, so far this part seems to work well, it appears. However, lower quality (not spam) still sifts through, though. But the Stumble button is one click away ;)
Here is the full text from Google cache from yesterday.----------------informational: Our primary strategy to combat rating spam is to sandbox offending accounts in a manner that both (a) prevents the spammed ratings from influencing the stumble button of other users and (b) prevents the spammer from realizing that their strategy is ineffective. Then, occasionally, we purge batches of these spammer accounts and their attendant reviews and tags. Another strategy that we’ve used on occasion is to allow the spammer to spend months futilely attempting to promote a garbage website before eventually banning that website. This tends to generate helpful word-of-mouth in spammer forums. Unfortunately, because most of the various sandboxed states aren’t visible to the general public, this leads to the incorrect impression that spamming is tolerated. The best ways via which a concerned citizen can inform the sandboxing process are: 1. Rate garbage content thumb-down. 2. Mark spam reviews as unhelpful (Helpful->No). 3. Report spam messages that arrive in your inbox. 4. Flag suspected spammer accounts via the ’Flag as Spammer’ feature. As you probably expect, we have a general policy not to discuss algorithmic details of our rating and anti-spam technologies in the forums. On the other hand, we are interested if you believe that you’ve discovered a spammer who has not been sandboxed. The best route via which you can present evidence of spamming activity is the feedback page [1]. Regarding the paypal.com reviews.... Many spammers believe that rating, reviewing and/or tagging several legit pages will make an account seem more real. Apparently, this spammer has a relatively unsophisticated partially automated solution that targets a fixed list of pages. We like when that happens. ;-) We have a nascent proposal to introduce a class of trusted user who could see the sandboxed state of accounts. But because our sandboxing code has grown organically, this would require a lot of refactoring. I make no promises.---------------------------
Nice Jeremy ... thanks! That’s fantastic. Not sure why but I wasn’t able to pull it up myself.
Thanks Jeff and Jeremy... very interesting indeed. :)
thanks for the real post - I had stumbled oddly enough to that page on the forums earlier today.very good to know.