9 Comments

MyBlogLog Needs to Wake Up To Their Porn Problem

Dec 11, 2008
by

I am not a prude by any means. Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl “malfunction” did not shock me. However, the porn photos masquerading as profile pictures for porn spammers that Yahoo allows into MyBlogLog I do find irritating.

The thing is I have to admire their ingenuity. Yahoo states quite clearly that “spam” in their opinion is solely tied to email messaging. It is not tied to profile pictures. So what does a smart spammer do? Create a robot that while active in MBL visits several hundred blogs. Thus their promotional picture shows up on the MBL widget for that community as a “reader”.

Now it would be a different matter if the site was listed as being open to adult content. However this problem occurs on sites, like here at ReveNews, which are not listed as open to adult content.

An email to Yahoo’s Customer Service has gone unanswered for three days. Not surprising since Yahoo is notoriously bad when it comes to cleaning up its own space. I am also reasonably certain that this slow response is not a record by any means.

MyBlogLog has all the elements of a really great tool. Blog owners, especially those whose content is more news orientated, will find the oversight that allows these spammers in as a poor reflection on their community.

Yahoo needs to realize that in certain cases a picture can equal a thousand words of spam. Until then actual readers can get their news and their g-string pictures at the same time.

Filed under: Adware, Spyware, Greynets, & Internet Fraud
  • http://www.samharrelson.com Sam Harrelson

    Amen, Angel.

    It's frightening to see how far they've let that service go since its high point at the beginning of '07.

  • http://www.advaliant.com peter bordes

    Funny you should bring this up. we just had a discussion about whether or not to use MyBlogLog on a new property due to this issue.

    Lately i have porn in almost every group and showing up on blog widgets. This needs to be cleaned up asap. everyone else has an initiative…. why dont they.

  • http://associatemoney.com Associate Money

    I have yet to use MyBlogLog but I heard it is a good community for getting traffic.

    I am getting second thoughts about using it though after knowing about the prevalent porn from your post.

  • http://www.samharrelson.com Sam Harrelson

    "I have yet to use MyBlogLog but I heard it is a good community for getting traffic."

    I think that's the main problem with services such as MyBlogLog and explains why they quickly fell out of vogue with most publishers.

    Services like MBL are great if you live in an ideal world where there are no marketers or people looking for traffic back to their own site.

    However, the model is flawed once marketers get a hold of it and realize there is traffic potential because there is no gatekeeping for the publisher beyond having to go back in to the interface after the fact and clear out the spammers. It's a losing scenario.

    That's why I think Twitter and the platforms that have been made popular since MBL was sold to Yahoo back in '07 have done so well (especially for those of us in the marketing space)… it's the publisher or user who gets to be the gatekeeper and fend off the spammers as they arise. The follow/no-follow/block paradigm is much better than the wild-west mentality of MBL.

    I loved MBL when it first came out in '06. I also really loved Scott Jangro's BumpZee. But both of them suffer(ed) from the ease of drive-by-spam that surely comes when there is traffic available.

    Truth be told, if we were doing the ReveNews revision today (a year later), I would have no second thoughts about leaving off the MBL widget and would have instead put up a Twitter widget for followers of the RN account.

    Sam

  • http://www.popshops.com Angel Djambazov

    Interesting comment about a Twitter widget Sam. The miss use of MBL is a clear example of marketers polluting a community. A large part of the problem is Yahoo's unwillingness to police that community. I have to wonder if the same issues won't occur with Twitter as they grow and whether they will have the resolve to address them.

  • http://www.samharrelson.com Sam Harrelson

    Right, but that's my point about Twitter etc as a more mature platform… you can always not follow, unfollow or block someone or a spammer before they pollute or enter into your stream. It's sort of MBL flipped around.

  • http://www.cumbrowski.com/ Carsten Cumbrowski

    I sent Yahoo an email a few months ago about their "junk problem" in Flickr. Spammers created hundreds of profiles and under each profile the spammer created some Flickr groups. Then they use the group description for their promotional message with affiliate links.

    They thanked me for my email and my examples, but didn't do anything.. the junk is still here, see here.

    p.s. finding a real Flickr group to the subject in the search query is practically impossible because of all this junk, rendering their search feature for groups useless in this instance.

    It's no email… so in their eyes no spam… but does it matter how Yahoo! see's it? I think it is more important how users see it, and I am not talking about US, the power users. I am talking about Joe Everybody.

    Some holds true for profile avatars, profile pages, background etc.

  • http://blog.mybloglog.com/ Tilly McLain

    Heya!

    My name is Tilly, and I'm the community manager over here at MyBlogLog, nice to meet you :)

    Dude, I totally hear you about the spam issues, spammers suck. Can't give the internet anything nice huh? :P

    The tricky part is that the image that comes up on your Recent Readers widget is supplied from Yahoo, not hosted on MyBlogLog. The idea was that you would have one avatar that you use across the board on the Yahoo network. Great in theory, but all it takes is a couple bad eggs to ruin it for everyone. :(

    MyBlogLog is down to a pretty small team as of late, we are doing what we can to blacklist the pervy members that sign up, but sometimes it feels like for each one we blacklist, a hundred more pop up in its place. Its a vicious circle. You can however hover over the users avatar and click the little red X that pops up, this will prevent the member from ever appearing on your widget ever again!

    And if you wanna help out the cause, pop over to the members profile and click the Report Abuse link on the bottom of the page, in the footer. This send a report over to me and I then go in and investigate.

    And I'm sorry that you didn't receive a prompt reply from the customer care department at Yahoo. We actually started hosting support here in house, so if you drop me a line at http://www.mybloglog.com/support I pretty promise that I will personally respond to you as quick as I can :D

    Thank you so so much for your patience with us, and your continued support. I speak for the entire team when I say that we totally appreciate each and everyone of our users, cause without you guys we wouldn't be as cool as we are!

    Drop me a line anytime!

    XOXO

    Tilly

  • http://mmo-critic.blogspot.com mmo critic

    Most people who promote any type of porn are spammers.

    More porn = more spam