I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Digg as they have to deal with a different type of spam problem to say email platforms, forums and blogs. However, I really feel that they could do a better job.
Take for instance this little blogging network I’ve just uncovered. A recent Digg made the Digg homepage outing indiafmcom as a spammer as within minutes of registering on Christmas day, he’d submitted hundreds of diggs, sometimes 3 or 4 a minute, which I didn’t even think was possible. Thanks to this post Digg closed the account.
I thought it’s be interesting to see if he was part of digg spam network, as all of his diggs seemed to be getting roughly the same amount of diggs. Not surprisingly, he was indeed getting help. However, these accounts haven’t been banned yet. Check out the articles recently dugg by these users, and how many of them are from indiadfmcom and how fast they were being dugg:
What these accounts seem to have also done, is prior to digging indiafmcom’s digg spam, is very quickly digg a couple dozen posts on the digg homepage, I think to try and trick digg’s rating system into thinking they are genuine diggers. This is only a small network of 6 people. Imagine the impact a network of 20-30 accounts could have. Digg hasn’t shut these accounts down yet, which makes me think they only caught indiafmcom because a user posted his details.
I can understand the difficulties in creating rules so that if a user diggs too many articles submitted by another user, as many diggers just digg the articles of the top 100 diggers. However, Digg really needs to implement standard spam rules that other services use like:
- Not accepting too many submissions per minute/hour from one account etc
- If a user diggs xx number of articles in a minute, then adding some kind of protection to make sure it’s a real person
- Not allowing users to Digg or post articles for x days after registering. Drastic, but many forums do this and it has become an acceptable practice
- If a user diggs more than XX% of their total diggs from one site, then don’t accept any more diggs until investigated
- Not allowing users to digg articles until they’ve got an article on the homepage. Drastic I know (Digg kind of do this anyway, through the power given to its top users)
The sad thing about this, is that Indiafm.com is actually a very nice site with a PR of 7. I wonder if the actions of this one user who may or may not be associated with indiafm (in fact he could be deliberately be trying to get indiafm banned), will result in indiafm.com being banned from Digg? I haven’t tried submitting a indiafm url to digg as I don’t want my account to be potentially banned!
