PUBLIC MARKS with search spam

I’m tempted to just turn comments off, they certainly attract more spam than good stuff. I think they make sense if you already have a huge readership, otherwise other channels seem better. I kind of like the olden days, where you’d see a blog post and respond by writing your own blog post linking to the former.

This article follows the search for the perfect solution to the problem of increasing amounts of human-generated spam. We’ll look at how and why CAPTCHAs are used and their effect on usability in order to answer key questions: what is the perfect CAPTCHA, and are they even desirable?

One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear: Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google

Complete and utter bullshit.

The page dedicated to popular bookmarks (delicious/popular), which is one of the most visited pages on the famous social bookmarking service that counts something like 66 million monthly pageviews, is continuously flooded with spam and in the headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, no one seems to notice it.…Delicious is a dead man walking waiting for someone to put an end to his agony

Almost any email address that you use for any length of time eventually becomes widely enough known that you should assume all the spammers have it. So either you sacrifice stable communications, or learn to tolerate a certain baseline of spam.

The ad-hoc mailing list is cool. But you never know when a discussion stop and restart. There are some ongoing discussions I have with friends which last for years but at a very irregular pace and sometimes with 6 months of inactivity.

The last year and a half I have been confronted to a similar issue:

1. It costs to create a mailing list (admin work, email addresses, etc.)

2. Archives are good, specifically in a work context. It helps rebuild context for people who are late in the discussion. It helps remembering some decisions.

3. People do not know how to use dynamic folders for managing their emails. (Unfortunately) (All my mails of the last 20 years are in dated space folder with dynamic folders created for the current needs)

4. People do not know how to unsubscribe a mailing-list, but they know how to cc someone.

5. Some mails really belongs to more than one context, and it is a struggle for some people to know where to send them.

Some thoughts about a possible system (all issues not solved)

1. So I was wondering about a system where each mail has a unique id (already the case) and is saved online with its own archive.

2. The mail before being sent to the recipients has its header modified with a Archived-At: containing the URI of this specific mail.

3. It could have another header X-Thread-Archive-at: with the list or content of all emails in this thread.

4. The ACLs are dynamically set on each Web individual archive depending on who has been copied to this email.

5. The ACLs are inclusive for any new persons who is being added to the thread, including previous messages.

6. There is a possibility to tag and/or do positive bias filtering on emails the same way we do with spam, in a working context we would have a kind of shared vocabulary of contexts dynamically created. So the mails would be showing in dynamic contextual views.

Posted by: karl at October 13, 2010 12:54 AM