Spammers Begone
I have today released a new feature for the DearDiary.Net site which puts the power to dispose of spammers firmly in the hands of our trusted users. I will no longer need to verify that people who are marked as spammers should in fact be removed from the site. Instead of relying on any user to advise me that a site is spam, I have changed the system a little.
Trusted users will have their account marked as ‘Moderator’ and will be able to mark sites as spam (which will remove them from any visibility from search engines, as well as remove them from the front page lists or recent updates lists) without any interaction from me. Click the menu bar at the top that shows ‘Mark as Spammer’ and they’ll be gone.
To do this, you need to be marked as a moderator. I will only be allowing people who I’ve known on the site (or in person) for a while to do this, as it’s extremely powerful and requires an element of trust. If you would like to become a moderator and you’ve been on the site for a while and are reasonably well known to me, please let me know your username and I will consider your request 🙂
This should help return DearDiary.Net to the more community focussed site that it should be rather than the continual spam cleanup site it has become of late!
Any comments, please feel free to leave them below as always!
I would be happy to help out, but could use some guidance in recognizing the spammers. I just went to the front page and found two that LOOK like diaries and sound like them, but seem to have only one entry. Is THAT a spammer?
Anyway, like I say, be happy to help out if get a little education.
🙂
If they look like diaries and sound like them, they probably are. Spammers are fairly easy to spot. They are usually trying to tell you how good Louis Vitton is, with at least one or two (sometimes many more) links to external sites where they’re selling such items.
Generally speaking, if a diary has links outside to commercial looking websites I consider them spam, unless they’ve been around a long time, have lots of other personal entries that clearly are personal – then they’ll probably get away with it.
Generally speaking, read a couple or more entries – unless the title is obviously commercial in nature – and see what your gut is. If in doubt, leave it and let someone else mark it as spam I guess. If in no doubt, go ahead and hit the button and watch them disappear 🙂