Squidblog

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