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Dealing with SPAM on ActiveRain

By
Real Estate Technology with ActiveRain

One of the issues that we knew from we'd have to deal with from the outset of building this network is how to deal with spam within the site.  There is often fine line when it comes to classifying what is spam, especially on a site with a central focus on marketing.  But, I think there obvious cases are where the content is blatently mislabeled or there is absolutly no redeeming value to any target audience.  For example there probably has been a half dozen blog posts made in the last week filled with simply a long list a of key words and offsite links, with a clear and sole intent is to spam search engines. Hosting that type of spam on this site can have a very negative impact on this community as a whole. 

In these cases where there it is pretty black and white, we will delete the posts, deduct points and notify the poster with a warning.  If they continue this practice after being warned their account will be disabled.   

On posts where the area is more grey we will usually notify that poster and let them know what they are doing may not be in the best interest of the network.  But we also ask that members of the community help us do this if they see someone they personally know writing spammy posts.

On a side note, today we had several pranksters create false profiles on the site which we rapidly disabled.  Somewhat suprisingly this is the first time since launch 5 weeks ago which we had to do that, and it is something we feel we'll be able to monitor and respond to fairly rapidly.

We would appreciate any feedback from members of this community on this issue.

-Matt Heaton (CEO)

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Matt Heaton
Timu Corp - CEO, ActiveRain - Co-founder - Bothell, WA
Another issue we are going to have to be very vigilant against is plagerism, posting articles from other sites without the sites permission. As you can probably imagine hosting plagerized articles can have a very negative impact. If we see an instance where we believe this is happening we will notify the poster.
Jul 01, 2006 04:56 PM
Thomas Bailey
SitesBuildings.com - Frankfort, KY

Too funny!  I just signed up for ActiveRain, and read this post.  Then I go to the Blogs section, and look, there is a guy with several posts with nothing but links, tons of them!!!

Hilarious.  You might want to check it out.  I'm not going to mention his user name, but you'll know it when you go there. 

Policing the blog is going to be the toughest part.

Jul 03, 2006 04:04 PM
Matt Heaton
Timu Corp - CEO, ActiveRain - Co-founder - Bothell, WA

Just finished removing that guys posts and deleted his profile which was obviously fake.   The only consolation I get is it probably took him at least 10 times the effort to create the profile and blog posts as it took me to delete them.

Jul 03, 2006 08:40 PM
Don Lantier
Donald J Lantier Realty - Smyrna, GA
Broker/Owner of LantierRealty.com & HouseTour4

oh...and as a gesture to initiate verifiable licensure I submit my Georgia licnesure info:

Donald J. Lantier

license number:  281676

Firm number: H-47715

Georgia Real Estate Commission website address: (click on consumer info and then real estate agent and enter license number)   http://www.grec.state.ga.us/

Jul 05, 2006 01:58 PM
Jacqulyn Richey
Prominent Realty Group - Las Vegas, NV
Las Vegas Real Estate
Spam is an issue that you'll have to deal with any time you have a website, directory or forum. Perhaps you should institute a limit of one account per person, period. They can always list their additional websites in the about section, but that will limit the amount of spammy sign ups, like in the Nevada section.  There is one person with 3 or 4 accounts, virtually identical, save the website address.  They could have put that effort into one and put some genuine content up instead.
Jul 07, 2006 12:19 PM
1 1
1 - Mesa, AZ
Just a heads up Matt, its spelled 'plagiarism' , hint hint, how about a built in spell checker.  lol
Jul 10, 2006 03:01 PM
Brian Barnes
First National Bank of Layton - Antioch, CA
Thanks
Jan 14, 2007 06:56 PM