Over the past few months, the Squidoo community has seen tremendous growth. Traffic and lensmaster royalties continue to soar, and the quality and uniqueness of our over 100,000 lenses is mindboggling.
But along with growth comes growing pains, and we’ve received an increasing number of complaints that spam and inappropriate lenses are getting out of control. The bad actors, it appears, noticed a thriving community and took the opportunity to dominate it. Although those complaints seemed to fall on deaf ears, the reality is far from it. In fact, we’ve been soaking up these criticisms like a sponge, retaining and contemplating them, and for the past few weeks we’ve been hard at work on scalable, long term solutions to these problems. Today marks the launch of a major release that we hope will make significant strides in keeping the Squidoo community a clean well-lighted place.
Here’s an overview of the new features we’ve implemented.
Safe Search, Movie Ratings Style
We’ve moved from two options (”all ages/eyeballs” and “mature”) to a three option movie-style rating system (G, R, and X) when determining for whom a lens is appropriate. Lenses which were previously marked as “safe for all ages and eyeballs” are now rated G, and “mature/adult” lenses are now rated X. This setting can be changed anytime in the Workshop sidebar, and from now on when creating a new lens you’ll be prompted to select the appropriate rating.
Current lensmasters should review their safe search preferences on the My Account page. Please note that because of the update, you should logout and log back in before visiting the My Account page to review your settings.
We feel that the new ratings system does a much better job of representing the variety of content on Squidoo, and allows the community to interact only with lenses that match their tastes. In addition, it gives mature and adult lensmasters more freedom to categorize their lenses appropriately. R and X rated lens are no longer locked into a specific topic, and they will now enjoy full indexing by search engines.
More information about our ratings system can be found in the FAQ.
Lens Flagging
We’ve made it even easier to report lenses that seem inappropriate or spammy. First, in the bottom of the sidebar on each lens is an indication of the lens’s current rating. We hope that lensmasters will find this useful when attempting to determine whether a lens’s content is marked appropriately. Next, after clicking on the “Flag this lens as ‘may offend’” link, we’ve added a handy dropdown of common reasons why a lens should be reported. This makes for even speedier reporting of baaaaad content. The comments box is now optional.
And to keep up with all these flagged lenses, we’ve appointed a trusted new semi-staffer whose sole responsibility will be reviewing each and every flagged lens, and taking appropriate action to eradicate spam or designate adult content when necessary.
Group Spam
Wooooow this was a big one. Nothing’s worse than waking up in the morning, seeing 10 Squidoo group join requests in your email, and realizing that 8 of them are spam. OK, I can probably think of a few things that are worse, but it’s still a daunting problem. At last, we have a solution.
First off, if you receive a spammy group join request, you can ban the lensmaster. From now on, this will prevent the same lensmaster from joining ANY of your groups. In addition, once a lensmaster has been banned from 3 groups, they can no longer join ANYONE’s groups. And when you visit a lens that has group spammed you, you can help us get rid of them quicker by reporting them using the lens flag tool (one of the available options in the new dropdown is “this lens spammed my group”). Finally, we reviewed the list of currently banned lensmasters and eradicated the worst offenders. Sayonara!
Other Thoughts on Spam
As Squidoo continues to grow and thrive, there’s no question that the evil-doers will be right behind us. But we’re a dedicated crew, and we now have the tools to keep a lid on the problem for the time being. Aside from the community-powered tools mentioned above, the SquidStaff also has the ability to quickly delete a collection of spam lenses organized around a specific keyword. In the past few days, we’ve removed over 1,500 fraudulent accounts from spammers who hijacked specific terms. If you notice this happening in the future, please submit a bug report with the keyword in question and we’ll be happy to investigate.
We thank our lensmasters for offering many of the suggestions that made these improvements possible, and we ask that you hold onto your seat and prepare yourself for the amazing improvements we’ll be releasing in the near future.
Edit: We’ve also implemented a new policy which requires an email address to be confirmed before its lenses can be published. Sorry, I forgot to mention this one earlier.
