Hey gang! We’ve been getting a small increase in spam activity finding its way though the many nets. To be honest, there are lots of much more interesting blogs that are still waiting in draft, but it seems like as good a time as any to give a little reminder about spam, and what you can do to help. There’s nothing new here, but it bears repeating. Here are some frequently (some very frequently) asked questions. Anything we haven’t covered? Just ask us in the comments below or whack us an email.
How can I tell what is spam?
Is it a submission that has nothing to do with a competition or winning anything? Bingo, that’s spam. Still not sure? Is it in a foreign language (like Hindi, Arabic, Yiddish, Chinese) or poorly written english? Spam.
Why would the site get spammed? What’s the point?
Competition Hunter receives a lot of web traffic. It can also direct a lot of traffic to a competition very quickly. The two main reasons a spammer would target CH is that they could get traffic from us, but even more valuably, an inbound link, useful for search engine rankings.
How much of a problem is spam?
99.9% of the time, it isn’t. If we didn’t direct so many resources to combatting it, it’d be a huge problem. That said, there may be the odd bit that slips through, despite our best efforts, and because otherwise the site is spam free, it often feels more serious.
What do you do to fight spam?
Anti-spam measures are and always have been the no.1 destination for resources (both money and time) and our no.1 focus for technical development. We have content and user filters that consider geography, IP address, on-site behaviour, keyword content, as well as interactions with a number of global anti-spam networks and databases. These are always being adapted and improved, because, alas, spammers are very resourceful indeed. If it were just humans we were against, it’d be easy (because we reckon we’re smarter, obviously), but so much these days is automated and very sophisticated evolving exploitation. If we let everything through, we’d receive a bombardment of thousands in a day, before the site breathed its last and fell over.
Do you have moderators?
We do have human moderators. Real humans. We’d love to have more, but moderation is expensive. We’re also committing so much resource to structural anti-spam work, we have to find a balance somewhere. But there’s another reason we don’t depend on human mods.
What can I do?
The whole idea of the voting system (voting up/voting down a competition) is for you, yes you, to dictate what is good and what is junk. If it’s good, it deserves an upvote (it might make its way the front page if it gets enough votes). If it’s not good, or it’s spam, vote it down. If the submission gets a minimum of three downvotes, it disappears. It really is as simple as that. Not only do you earn Karma every time, but you help all other users avoid anything irrelevant or crappy if it has managed to make it to the site. Some people vote it up. I know. We just can’t help those people 