What Constitutes Blog Spam?

I'd like to tell you about a new business opportunity everyone's talking about!

Anyone who's been on JoeUser long enough remembers the days of diamond-d, Orrin Woodward, Island Reef Casino etc.  These were blogs that pushed either a company, a product or a service.  Often times they would submit a flood of posts to crowd out the Recent Articles list.  And it turns out that some of those blogs were part of a Google bombing effort to raise one company's Google ranking.  These were articles that didn't invite discussion, and were usually bad copy-paste jobs of work posted elsewhere.  We've cleared some of these offending blogs out, but many have just sort of died under their own ineffectiveness..

My question then is, is this actually spam?  Spam is generally defined in terms of unsolicited email, or in the blogging world unrelated comments posted to an article that merely are attempts to advertise an unrelated site/product/whatever.  But can the blogs themselves be spam? 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines spam as "unsolicited usually commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses"
Even Wikipedia (unbiased, untainted source that it is) when mentioning blog spam specifically limits the definition to email and comments, essentially looking towards directed and unsolicited advertising.
Take a look at the JoeUser/Stardock Terms of Use and you'll see we currently limit the definition of spam to directed, unsolicited emails etc.

But how does that play here on JoeUser?  A site that is very different from typical blog sites, where the emphasis is on community and sharing of articles, instead of everyone being an isolated island disconnected from everyone else on the site.  Sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga etc do not connect sites together automatically, and there's nothing in the way of automatically showing users an aggregate of recent or popular articles.  So on those sites, advertising blogs vanish into obscurity unless heavily linked to from outside websites.  JoeUser, with it's syndication across all the Stardock sites does all of that automatically.  A single article posted to the Personal Computing section will be crawled by Google from at least three different Stardock sites (JoeUser, GalCiv2, WinCustomize).  And our sites aren't exactly poorly ranked by Alexa or Google, so the spam potential goes way up.

Aside from the auto-linking issues however, does spam need a different definition for sites like JoeUser?  Are these articles even Spam necessarily since they're not unsolicited advertisements?  You don't have to click on them. You don't have to download them.  They don't interfere in any way with your system, your Internet connection or anything critical to your day-to-day life.  They can be annoying, they can push your article out of the "Recent" list, but is that spam? 

13,965 views 19 replies
Reply #1 Top

Yes...it's 'spam'....when the crap ends up on the Wincustomize.com forums it's spam.

When they inadvertently push old threads to the fore anything up to 4 or 5 years after they were dead and buried then they are INTERFERING with the site and its community.

It is INVASIVE and UNSOLICITED.

If their accounts actually existed they wouldn't for long.

Personally I'd have their balls.

And if it's all intended to aid and abet Google then I'd have THEIR balls as well.

Reply #3 Top
When one or 2 articles are posted per day, it is advertisement.  But when those Hydrocone ones came through, they would fill pages of JU, and yes that was spam.
Reply #5 Top
I agree with jafo.... some people spend much time writing articles, and then some idiot resurrects 30 old articles with such pearls of wisdom like"goose tremors wild green" yes that is spam to me too.
Reply #6 Top
I think this is a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good.

I mean, taking a legalistic approach to the definition of spam just adds another layer of confusion, complication, and bureaucracy to the whole thing.

There's a reason we think of the examples you gave as spam, and it's not because we spend a lot of time looking at the dictionary definition of spam. It's because we spend a lot of time looking at the spam itself.

A guy--or a cabal, or a robot--poops marketing material all over a community blog site, call it whatever you like, no matter what name you give it, it's still not cool.
Reply #7 Top

A guy--or a cabal, or a robot--poops marketing material all over a community blog site, call it whatever you like, no matter what name you give it, it's still not cool.

Kind of like those "Earn a Gazillion dollars from Home" things we see in our real estate neighborhoods.

Reply #8 Top
"goose tremors wild green"



That's only to be posted in an emergency.




I..uh....ummm..
Reply #9 Top
I agree with Jafo too. It's not nice to think you're seeing something that's current only to realise that this article is so old and dead. I responded to one yesterday without realising it! And the fact that these old articles keep the current ones buried is not good! Spam it is!
Reply #10 Top
Personally I'd have their balls.

And if it's all intended to aid and abet Google then I'd have THEIR balls as well.


I agree 100% with you....but then I got out the wrong side of the bed as well....been cussing & swearing at stuff all day.

Yes Zoomba, it's most definitely spam...no bout adoubt it cos it's uninvited and unwelcome, sent by drive-by entities with no connection to the Stardock sites.

Reply #12 Top
Definitions be damned! I think we all know spam when we see it. It's very annoying to say the least.
Reply #13 Top
Oh, by the way. I've stumbled onto a a great money making opportunity I'm sure you'll be interesting in. Just post your credit card number and personal information here and I'll be happy to tell you all about it after I get checked in to my Caribbean hotel.
Reply #14 Top
pus, gastrointentional..trees, blackhole, munch.
Reply #15 Top
Just wondering if this is connected in any way, but has anyone else had their forum posts hijacked to another web page during mid-reply, thus losing everything that had been typed? I've had it happen 3 times while in forum threads at WC...usually when at or near the end of a line and using abbreviations. The last time I was taken to a page about knitting that had similarities to some of those forum posts that ressurrect ancient threads.

Obviously it's not happening all the time, and being that the page/typed text is lost when taken to another site, it's nigh impossible to reproduce the exact situation for someone at Stardock to track down/investigate.

I ran checks for browser hijackers, bots, trojans and spyware, etc and all came up clean, nothing to indicate the problem is at my end. This issue only began since the forum upgrade at WC, and it only happens while in the forums here, so I'm wondering if it has something to do with these spammers/spam bots?
Reply #16 Top
2 Features in one day!  Damn!  No wonder everyone wants to be Zoomba!
Reply #17 Top

I don't want to be zoomba!

(this is starting to sound suspiciously like the "are YOU Markison" exchange on "A Few Good Men". I'll bow out now.)

Reply #18 Top
forum posts hijacked to another web page


No, but yesterday I clicked on a thread to check new replies and the replies were for the thread (Object Dock) but the main post was for birthdays.

Today, I replied on a post and when it refreshed it was an old post from April.
Reply #19 Top
#18 by Bichur
Wed, August 02, 2006 9:43 PM



[Bichur]
forum posts hijacked to another web page


No, but yesterday I clicked on a thread to check new replies and the replies were for the thread (Object Dock) but the main post was for birthdays.

Today, I replied on a post and when it refreshed it was an old post from April.


Technology is great...when it works.