Spam is something we all love to hate and we all have a good reason to do so. Almost daily like many of you I myself get the person looking to steal my identity claiming they are from some country and want me to have the money that belongs to a deceased person or the oh so lovely Enlarge yourself emails.
The same thing goes for the social media world. Some of the top dog sites such as digg for example has fallen victim to spam submissions and shouts. The same thing is now starting to occur on mixx. With the introduction of Mixx Mail it appears that the spammers have come out and decided to start sending links to they’re submissions or even other websites with this new feature. This has also increased the submission of blog spam from what I can see on my end.
Promoting what is obviously spam, blog spam, etc should not be done. This prevents articles worthy of the Popular Stories section including Photo’s and Video’s from getting there. On top of that it tells spammers that the community permits spam which is 100% entirely false. You can also blame blind voting on this as well. I’m guilty of doing this in the past and I don’t do this that much anymore and I try not to.
So I’d like to go over how we can combat this problem, keep it to the minimum and give some quick tips, suggestions, whatever you personally would like to call them.
Mixx has a way of keeping things clean on the site, but it does require the community to do they’re part. There are “Report This” links on every submission, and on every comment that has been made to a story. Simply click the link of what you want to report, the page will then fade and a dialog box will appear. Select the appropriate reason of what your reporting for by clicking the drop down menu. Your choices are “The link is broken”, “Content violates terms of use”, “Spam!”, “Someone is not being nice”, and “Other”. After that make sure you type a small but detailed description of what’s wrong with the article, what the user did, etc. This will help the people over at mixx in deciding if it should be removed, if the user should be contacted, if they should be banned etc.
That’s the best way in dealing with spam, blog spam, etc. Chris McGill said it best on the Mixxing Bowl:
“Our experience here to date is that if you ignore this stuff, it just gets 1 to 5 votes and the submitters really go nowhere. We have also found, however, that if we rile them- with comments or otherwise, then they make it a mission to come back and screw thigns up. so – in sum- my advice (and you do not have to take it since everyone is allowed to act of their free will) is to just ignore it. If a voting rings forms… then do NOT ignore it and please report it.”
Unfortunately Mixx Mail does not have a “Report This” system built in. The only thing it does have is a block user link. I personally think that something such as this is needed to be put in place now before it is too late. It’s important to remember that Mixx Mail is to be used to contact other members. This feature should never be used for promoting articles or promoting websites. Use the “Share This” feature to promote an article you think is worthy of the front page. But remember everything I mentioned here applies to that as well.
Also please remember that sending out a message to hundreds of members shouldn’t be done as well, this can get annoying and could also cause you to end up being blocked. If any of you users do, don’t get your panties in a twist if you got your ass blocked as Greg Davies put it. You have no one to blame but yourself. Many of the messages I have received could have done with out all of the hundreds of people it was sent to. Maybe 50 or even maybe a 100 max would be ok but past that it’s pushing it.
So on that note I’d like to bring this post to a close and just remind all of you to keep the community in mind and feel free to comment and post your own suggestions and input.
