Squidblog

Kimberly’s looking for love letters. The best, sappiest, goopiest, cleverest (and, of course, most sincere), win. Deadline: Wednesday August 1st, 3:00pm EST.

Squidoo was founded on recommendation. Real people making real, authentic recommendations about the best stuff online. The biggest part of this, of course, is the content you stick in your lens. The more curated, handbuilt and genuine the lens is, the better we’ve seen it perform.

Same goes for how you promote your lenses. When you create something worth talking about, and cultivate permission to market to people, and develop your content based on feedback, and dozens of other quality human interactions, your lens benefits. Why? Because, if they like it, people spread it for you.

If you aggressively promote a lens to someone who doesn’t want to hear from you, though, well, that’s spam. If you harass bloggers, that’s spam. If you email lensmasters or join Groups begging for lens ratings, that’s spam too. These actions are no better than fool’s gold–undiscerning lensmasters mistake it for the real thing.

In the past few weeks we’ve seen some otherwise good lensmasters chasing after fool’s gold, trying to promote their lenses via massive rating swaps. “I’ll give you 5 stars if you give me 5. I’ll lensroll you if you lensroll me.” Ugh. It’s one thing to ask your friends to check out your lens and offer feedback. It’s another thing to be a swapper. [History lesson: It's 2000 all over again, when blogging converged on ubiquity, and at the same time lost credibility in places. Bloggers went so nuts with link exchanges and blogrolls that they undermined their own editorial content. The people who focused only on the good stuff, and on real promotion... those are the ones who stuck].

Squidoo does not endorse or recommend ratings swaps. Not only because it’s not in the spirit of the site, but also because it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t earn you loyal readers or customers, it doesn’t help people find you in search engines, and it doesn’t increase the quality of your content. That, and it’s risky. A star rating is only a tiny factor in our LensRank algorithm right now. You’re not going to win with even 500 fake ratings. And, in fact, if you spam people asking for them, you’ll assuredly lose.

Finally, remember: Squidoo reserves the right to change our LensRank algorithm at any time. We’re currently working on (unannounced) changes that will end up impacting swappers without warning. Building a so-called business on massive rating swaps or traffic exchanges could mean you did a whole lot of work for a whole lot of nothing.

NEWSFLASH!

Brilliant lensmaster of the day, Glen, just launched Lensroll.com. It’s DIGG for Squidoo lenses. It’s a chance to plug your best work, and have others check it out. Roll your own, and roll others that you like. Sweet.

Brilliant lensmaster #2 of the day, Mr. Lewis Smile, has a lot to say over his SquidooCool blog. Lots of Squidoo updates, tricks, ponderings (and ponies?!). If you’re not a Lewis fan, you’re missing out.

Yesterday we released an update which resulted in Flickr and Google Maps modules not displaying properly. We just pushed a fix and they should now be working again.

If you experience any further trouble please let us know.

Thanks,
Gil

Those of you who track Squidoo pretty closely know that we had a lousy week. 30 spammers took advantage of us and blew Squidoo’s name all over the web.

The good news is that as of Thursday, July 12th, all of those holes are closed. We erred on the side of goodwill, and we’re going to be a lot more careful in the future.

The other good news is that the Net responded appropriately. Sites started blocking posts from and searches to Squidoo as a way of insulating themselves from the few dozen that would ruin it for the rest of us. Unfortunately, those responses dampened visits to all of Squidoo, not just the bad parts.

I fully expect that as we finish our cleanup, and as the number of good lenses continues to amaze the rest of us (check out this one on bamboo, for example; or this one on Ancient Greece; or even this, on the iPhone), the web will respond the way it should, and has, by linking back to the Squidoo pages that deserve it.

Thanks for hanging in with us. Growing pains!

We couldn’t do it without you and your support.

Lensmasters donated new computers to a classroom in Slidell, Louisiana.

A few months ago, the Squidoo.com community donated a few thousand dollars to Donors Choose, a terrific organization that makes it easy for teachers to bring classroom projects (without official budgets!) to life.

One of the projects we supported was the classroom of Rebecca Besch, who had applied for new computers, monitors, and Photoshop to boot.

I was delighted to get a thank you note from Rebecca recently, along with pictures and handwritten notes from the kids.

Sometimes I forget how good it feels to, well, do good. And that the Squidoo community is making a big impact in the real world.

Thanks, lensmasters.

In last week’s post I mentioned that we’re embarking on an exciting, proactive approach to combating spam at Squidoo. We’ve learned two things in the last ten days or so: First, that spammers will flock when they find a hole they can exploit, and second that our users and others are incredibly helpful in finding the holes and working with us to plug them.

At the heart of our new efforts are six new structural changes that we’ll be focusing on over the next week or two:

1. First, we’re implementing a Bayesian spam filter to screen all newly published lenses at the front door, and those that look like spam will not be allowed to be published in the first place.

2. Next, because computers aren’t perfect, we’re adding an editorial review phase with actual humans reviewing each and every new lens that gets created, to make sure they comply with the rather lengthy spam guidelines in our Terms of Service. We may end up with some false positives, but we’re going to make it easy for you to tell us if we accidentally step on a good lens you’ve built.

3. Third, we’re implementing IP-based tools to help us analyze multiple accounts created by spammers. When a spammer hits our radar, we won’t just kill the reported account…we’ll kill them all.

4. Once our new anti-spam technology is in place, Squidstaffers and trusted community volunteers will also be reviewing all existing lenses to sniff out the bad guys. I have no doubt that this isn’t the perfect solution, but it’s a huge step in the right direction. In the end, it’s just going to be easier for spammers to go somewhere else.

5. We’ve created a Report Spam form and linked it from every page on Squidoo. It’s a fast, easy way to report spam directly to our editors, who will monitor the feedback and delete abusive accounts daily. Our users have been incredibly patient and helpful, and we’re going to make it easier than ever for you to keep the lid on the few (we think it’s only about 30 people!) bad actors that are spamming all of us.

6. Finally, last week we implemented a new internal classification for lenses: “Featured” lenses and “Work-in-Progress” lenses. Featured lenses are those with a LensRank above a certain threshold. We’ll be playing with this threshold number quite a bit in order to find a sweet spot. If your lens is featured, it shows up in Squidoo search results. Work-in-Progress lenses are lenses with a LensRank below that threshold. If your lens is a work-in-progress, it won’t be featured in Squidoo search results. While we passionately believe that everyone deserves a voice, and access to free tools for creating web pages, we also believe that to be featured in Squidoo search results, and to our community, is a privilege. As with all success online, the best way to get featured and make sure your lens shows in Squidoo search results is to share good content, stay authentic, and don’t spam. For 99.9999% of the people reading this, that won’t be a problem at all!

The bottom line of this entire post is that authentic pages built by real people with good intentions are the future of the web, and we’re more focused than ever before on making it easy for you to do that.

We’re really proud of the good stuff our community has put out so far, and prouder still of their help kicking spammers to the curb.

Thanks, guys.

Hey guys,

Squidoo is growing by leaps and bounds, and with success also comes trouble. Spamming is a hot topic right now, and I just wanted to post a quick note to let everyone know what we’re doing to cope with the problem.

Group Spam

We recently added a “Ban Lensmaster” link on the page you visit in order to approve a lens as part of your group. It sure didn’t make sense to have this feature available only when a lensmaster was added to the group, so we fixed it! Hat tip to Relache for the suggestion.

When a lensmaster is banned from one of your groups, they are prevented from joining ANY of your groups ever again. Once a lensmaster gets banned X number of times, they’re banned sitewide.

We’re also adding the “Report a Lens” tool to group HQs, which will make it easier for spammers who create bogus groups to hit our radar. As always, we really appreciate your help in finding and reporting them.

Guestbook Spam

I’ve seen it too. Someone who seemingly hasn’t even perused your lens submits a guestbook entry linking back to them. I don’t think it’s fair either, and soon we’ll have two new features to keep this under control.

First, we’re adding a configurable setting that allows you to remove all HTML from your guestbooks. This option will be disabled by default, and guestbooks that prevent HTML will be clearly labeled. I’m also pushing for a new feature to make it easier to approve guestbook comments, but it’s still under discussion.

Second, we’re adding a Ban Lensmaster feature to guestbooks that will work the same way as the group version. We’re hoping this will reduce the amount of work necessary to keep your guestbooks updated.

One modulers

Lenses with less than 3 modules (not including the introduction) will no longer appear to be published, even if they have been. This will get rid of those who don’t bother writing anything besides an introduction.

Iframes

When we built Squidoo, we knew there’d be no way we could keep up with you guys in developing all the modules you’d need. Although we knew they’d become a problem eventually, we decided to allow the iframe HTML tag for the time being, because it gave you a powerful tool for customizing your lenses. Unfortunately, the time has come for us to disable iframes, in large part because of spammers who use them to automatically redirect lens surfers to porn sites. It makes policing really hard (because the spammers don’t respect the G/R/X rating system, and because you get redirected before you can even report the lens), and unfortunately there’s no way for us to know (or control) what’s on those third party pages.

If we don’t put a stop to it now, we run the risk of tarnishing our reputation in the blog community, which is having a hard time coping with these iframe spammers who post bogus blog comments and trackbacks linking to their pseudo-lenses. We don’t want any part of it, and unfortunately there’s no other alternative. Starting July 12th (one week from today), all iframes will be prevented from appearing anywhere on Squidoo. To all you bloggers who suffered the fallout, we’re really really sorry.

To make it up to you, we’re very interested in hearing what types of things iframes did for you, and we’ll do our best to build modules to bridge the gap. And if you’re a developer interested in building your own module, check out our Developers page.

And in conclusion

We’ve got a few more things in the works that we can’t talk about yet, but which will help us take a more proactive approach to spam. We’ll let you know about them as soon as we can. For now, we welcome your feedback and appreciate all the hard work you put into identifying the bad actors.

You guys rock.

Thanks,
Gil