Awakened Voice

I received a nice comment from one of Ning’s product managers after pointing out some issues with search and spam/seo activity on a post yesterday.
I also noticed that CEO Gina Bianchini has posted on the spam issue to the Ning blog.
Its heartening to know that they are willing to address these issues at a very [...]

File this one under annoyances that need to go away now!
There’s a service out there called Snap that I despise with a passion. Snap enabled websites have links that display a preview image with a search box when you mouse over an item. These preview images are utterly useless and can actually be damaging to [...]

Moderating comments is a simple but powerful way to protect your social site from the evil ways of spammers.
When you moderate comments they are pushed into a queue for review prior to being made viewable on the website. This feature adds an extra step to your process as the proprietor of a social site because you [...]

I mentioned Akismet back in May but it’s a tool worth mentioning again now that I’m harping on social media security.
Aksimet is a plugin for WordPress and over 20 other systems that filters out unwanted spam messages on your site. When you utilize the Akismet plugin you share information and get the benefit of shared [...]

This is the first of the spam fighting tools and techniques that I’ll feature following my wiki spam attack.
Bad Behavior is a set of PHP scripts that helps to protect social websites from spam bots. According to their official website Bad Behavior does this, “by analyzing their actual HTTP requests and comparing them to profiles [...]

I’ve mentioned the dangers of spam on this blog before, highlighting the pain of some other parties in their efforts to block spam on their social media websites. We’ll I should have taken my own medicine.
You see, I’ve got this site that I call the Social Media Wiki. When I set the site up I [...]

LibSyn is having a hard time with comment spam. According to the LibSyn blog, “…this is not a problem we are ignoring… but battling the spammers is a full time effort, no doubt.”
LibSyn is a fantastic podcast media hosting service that provides excellent bang for the buck. But they’re not immune to the pitfalls of [...]

The Tech Beat blog over at Business Week is having a hard time with trackback spam. So much so that they’ve turned off trackbacks until they can get the situation under control.
I sympathize with their plight. The fact is that spammers will find their way into your blog at every point of entry. Comments, [...]

The spammers are alive and well folks. As people have moved from email to blogs for their communication spammers have gotten smart and followed them.
In the last six months the pressure has really been put on any type of blog site that accepts comments. Even Frappr maps are targets for those unscrupulous folks who embed [...]

Shel Holtz reports that spammers have found their way to the social mapping community Frappr!.
Those dirty tricksters add people to public maps and include their ridiculous spam links in the description. The move to Frappr! maps proves that spammers will go anywhere they can their silly links posted for the world to see.
Users of Frappr! [...]