Looks like some spammers have found their way into del.icio.us popular, a collection of top and most popular links in the del.icio.us bookmarking service. This kind of spam has become a pain in the ass for most bloggers and other sites. Yahoo guys need to fix it soon!
It had to happen, although I wish them the same fate that I wish most spammers, a slow painful death.
Hey Om,
Yep. This is bad but you might want to address the issue of spam in Yahoo Groups. That’s just plain awful.
Scott
This was inevitable and widely predicted.
For example, Danny Sullivan said, “Wide-open tagging, where anyone can get their pages to the top of a list just by labeling it so, is going to be a giant spam magnet.” John Dvorak said, “the ‘folksonomy’ notion … is doomed to failure” because it will succumb to “vandalism and spam.” Rich Skrenta said, “Tags aren’t a panacea, since they’re excessively vulnerable to spam.”
You seem to be thinking there is an easy fix for this, but, if the spammers pour it on to the point where the vast majority of tags are incorrect, sorting the good tags from the bad becomes quite difficult.
For more, see my posts, “Manual vs. automated tagging” and “Questioning tags”:
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/02/manual-vs-automated-tagging.html
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2005/04/questioning-tags.html
Hey scott, can you let these guys know as well. i did drop them a note.
i just dropped them a note, and called the right people. hopefully the problem be fixed soon enough!
Noticed an abuser/spammer on Friday that has been removed today on the system. I would have gladly submitted a suspect member/submission if they would allow that.
Frustrating.
For the blackhat spammers who play in competitive google SERPS, manipulating del.icio.us is just a walk in the park 🙂
What Gopi said. Seriously, when Clay Shirky correctly defined social software as “Stuff that gets spammed,” that probably should have been a wake-up call that these systems need to come equiped with spam protection from the get-go, not just an “ignore user” link.
There’s all sorts of tag spamming hitting del.icio.us, and I’m worried that some of my topical RSS feeds are getting as blitzed as Technorati watchlists (which are near useless for popular topics now).
I’m starting to wonder if Silicon Valley’s relationship to spammers isn’t symbiotic. I know I’ve been suspicious of Microsoft for taking a publicly strong, but privately laissez-faire attitude toward the issue. It’s obvious with DRM that companies are always willing to trade user experience for profit potential.
del.icio.us has been ‘Nofollow’ing urls as well as putting meta noindex header tag on pages to make itself less useful for blackhat SEOs. Perhaps that has saved it so far.
But even nofollowing comments on blogs doesn’t seem to stop comment spam. CAPTCHAs could be annoyance but still effective.
For the blackhat spammers who play in competitive google SERPS, manipulating del.icio.us is just a walk in the park…
…the method with social bookmarks is going on for