New LJ anti-spam feature

[charmian]

http://news.livejournal.com/137089.html?thread=95366785#t95366785

LJ seems to have introduced an anti-spam measure which identifies and holds suspicious comments.

More info (Russian language)

It seems nowadays the best way to get info on what is happening on LJ is to read the journals of the Russian staff. Unfortunately, since I can't read Russian, I have to rely on Google Translate, so I am not confident on the details; however, it seems if you don't want to use this feature, you can turn it off in your settings. If this works, this will be a great advance, as many users are plagued with comment spammers.

Also as part of the new release, they've changed communities from being under their own domain to having URLs like regular journals. Possibly this may lead to better domain aliasing in the future? If this leads to comms being able to have persistent domain names, that would also mark a major advance.

There is also another change with external links in Plus and Basic journals: they will now have a "nofollow" attribute, which will, in the future, be applied according to a whitelist.

Comments

[sophie]

...that last bit, about the nofollow attribute being applied on Plus/Basic journals, saddens me terribly. :/

[matgb]

Agreed--I was going to do it anyway, but turning nofollow on for all links from non paid journals is just plain wrong, complete abuse of what nofollow is there for.

Sure, I've switched to DW, but I know a lot of people use LJ, properly, for blogging, etc. If Google is supposed to work by aggregating links and counting value, for a site to completely cut itself out of that is to work against that basic principle.

@Charmian, any idea what the 'whitelist' will be?

[charmian]

What is nofollow intended to be used for?

Hmm, so what is so bad about this? I don't think it'll impact the usage of most LJers, and it seems that a lot of people on LJ don't even like being "public" even if they have public journals, so I'm not sure how annoyed they'll be about not contributing to the search rankings on google.

Re: the whitelist. I have no idea... It doesn't seem to be currently in effect. Possibly if you know someone who knows Russian you can ask igrick?

[matgb]

Nofollow is meant to denote the person placing the link does not trust it or value it.

It's bad because search engines, especially Google, are reliant on the weight of information coming from links, especially of mid to low level users, to weight sites.

Essentially, this, to a small extent, degrades Google results, and as no one has yet to come up with a better algorithm for websearch, that means it degrades the web.

Yes, it's an antispam measure, but that's not a good thing to do.

And frankly I don't care whether users care or not, it directly affects me by reducing the strength of the search engine that gives the least worst results.

[charmian]

Ah, I see, so you're looking at it from the perspective of Google. However, it seems to me to be LJ's prerogative on what terms they want to contribute to Google. It does seem rather harsh to me that nonpaid users can't opt-in in some way, though, but perhaps there are ways that can be alleviated.

[foxfirefey]

Sounds like the spam situation on LJ has gotten bad enough that they don't on average trust or value links from unpaid users. It doesn't necessarily degrade search, even if it tosses out some good data, if an overwhelming amout of the data is actually bad.

[matgb]

Thing is, unless the Whitelist is for users they're trusting (which would be difficult to do but acceptable), then they're saying my links can't be trusted.

I've been using my links there for search purposes for more than half a decade, some of my sidebar links are actually important at times.

Sure, my DW is now more important, but this means LJ is useless for a semi-pro blogger unless they pay.

[azurelunatic]

Are you having a religious reaction to it? I am. Though mine may be somewhat less strong than yours.

[matgb]

Pretty much, if done bluntly and applied to all users, it's Just Wrong on a very basic level. I dislike that users can post publicly and opt out of search, but I've learnt to live with that. That the site itself is saying unpaid users are forcibly opted out of contributing?

My LJ used to have PageRank 6, links from it were actually valuable (I never sold them, obviously, but I did make use of it for campaign purposes). Now? Even if I wanted to, i couldn't make use of the network of people on LJ that I know to do perfectly legitimate things unless they all pay money to a company I no longer want to give money to.

[charmian]

Why? I don't know much about anti-spam tactics.... what is the problem with it?

[sophie]

matgb explains it pretty well in his response above, I think. Nofollow is the equivalent of specifically not linking to a site to stop search engines from following it because you don't want to give them PageRank. It degrades the quality of search engine results.

There is more to it, though. Given that LJ basically *is* blogging in Russia, doing this pretty effectively aids censorship by preventing basically the entire Russian blog landscape from helping to make relevant sites be more widely known. (Remember, most users are going to be nonpaid; however, I'm not sure how much of that applies to the Russian demographic so some more data on that would be nice to know.)

Then, of course, there's the fact that while paid users finance the site, free users provide most of its content. (Again, this could be different in Russia, I have no real idea, but this point applies to everywhere.) The idea that LJ doesn't trust its free users is kind of insidious, and in the long run can only lead to people leaving the service.

[charmian]

I have to wonder, though. LJ is full of splogs, so there is a chance that in the aggregate LJ is not a plus for search engine result quality.

The stuff about Russia does sound like a big problem. I wonder what Russian bloggers think about that, especially since this is public knowledge on the Russian side.

I don't think that free users interpreting it as a sign of distrust will lead to people leaving, however, although some might leave because they wish to be taken into account by google. It seems like more of an admission that they can't keep out spammers very well. If people are going to endure the page-takeover ads, isn't this minor, even invisible, in comparison, in terms of inconvenience?

[azurelunatic]

It's something that gets a morality-based reaction from me, weirdly enough. On an intellectual level, I know that what foxfirefey is saying makes perfect sense: there's a horrible infestation of spammers that's been growing for years, they just cut out a chunk but they've been metastasizing, I'm gathering there will be refinements down the road ... but it still strikes me as a moral wrong when applied to non-spammers. It's not just a "this is not a good thing", it's a more visceral reaction. It's very interesting to see what weird web-things activate that reaction in me. The last time I felt something similar, there was a Security by Obscurity incident, and I wound up ranting loudly about it on public transit, filling the Recommended Daily Allowance of "religion-ranting lunatic" for several people.

[charmian]

I suppose I find it difficult to feel this is a really terrible thing, except in the case of the Russian political bloggers; this is because many of the controversies I've seen on LJ center on people who want less publicity, so it's kind of burned into my mind that LJ is a place for "those who want to separate themselves from the rest of the web," whereas people who care about the impact their links have probably blog elsewhere, because LJ doesn't work that well with search engines anyhow. Obviously this isn't a scientific observation, but I suspect the English language userbase won't be that upset about this, though I may be wrong.

What I feel more strongly about, though, is that the English language userbase wasn't warned about this: there are some people who care about the impact their links have, and they should be informed about this so that they can move their links elsewhere.

[azurelunatic]

Intellectually, I don't think it's terrible. And morally, my "spammers are a bane upon everything they touch" is currently in negotiations with "links should be indexed unless deliberately private or untrusted" for which is a worse sin. So I'm feeling the unease of conflicting morals, but not half as strongly as security-by-obscurity gets me. I just find it interesting from an applied-psychology standpoint that I'm having an actual reaction where my moral code is getting involved, rather than intellectually-held principles.

[azurelunatic]

Interesting.

[charmian]

Oh, did you hear about this before? It seems these changes took place a few days ago, so I was debating whether to even post about it.

[azurelunatic]

I did not. I'm not really following LJ dev that closely any more.

[pne]

If this leads to comms being able to have persistent domain names, that would also mark a major advance.

I'm not sure what you mean by a persistent domain name that is currently not available for communities?

Domain aliasing already works, kind of - http://lje.mizinamo.org/ , for example, has been going to lj_ellinika for quite some time. (Though I think that protected entries aren't displayed, due to cookie issues - but I think that's the same whether the target of the alias is a community or a personal journal; in either case, the domain name is not *.livejournal.com.)

[charmian]

Meaning that it is more similar to a redirect, not how like it works on tumblr, where the individual entries will also have the domain name when you click on them, and the entire domain LJ.com doesn't appear when you interact with pages belonging to the journal.

[sub_divided]

There are plenty of people who will be upset that they can no longer gain Google levels by providing high quality on their Livejournals. What about all the BNFs who won't show up when you Google their fanfiction?

[charmian]

Re: BNFs. Note that this is only true of external links, as far as I understand it, and won't affect LJ links.

However, I find it hard to believe that many people in fandom who are aware of "google levels" (how does that work anyhow?) and care about them. Look at all of the people who've turned Google indexing off, after all.

Oh well, when this is publicly revealed in English LJ, I guess we'll see. I predict that if people are upset about it, it'll be more about having their entries 'edited' without their permission, more than the effects of the change itself.

[sub_divided]

I think you're seriously underestimating the number of people with fandom ambition on livejournal. Sometimes they're on livejournal because it is (or was) the best way to get a lot of readers who will interact with you to a high degree. I know a bunch of people who have a personal website, but use it to link to their entries on livejournal so they can keep all their comments (and work) in one place. Of course, with those annoying pop-up ads, livejournal's not the best platform for archiving your material anyway, but that doesn't mean that everyone who stays there doesn't care what non-site users see when they look.

[charmian]

Well, looking at the news comments so far, I don't see many people complaining about nofollow, but in my experience of people with fandom ambition, most of them didn't focus on google or search as the mechanism. If you are on LJ to get the people on LJ, shouldn't Google be irrelevant? (as people on LJ will find you via interest-related comms)

And anyway, as I pointed out, links to LJ sites are preserved, so they won't be affected by the nofollow in the first place.

[sub_divided]

Do you know whether unpaid communities are going to be hit with nofollow, or just unpaid individual journals?

I guess it's true that if you want to interact with the wider world, you don't chose (English language) livejournal as your platform. Still, it irks me to think all of the users of an entire site are going to be relegated to second class internet citizens status.

It is true, though, that in the past you could get an unfair pagerank boost just by e.g. friending lots of popular journals, since you'd show up on those journals' profile pages as a "friend of". I mean, that's probably what made the site attractive to robot spammers in the first place, right: robots don't even have to leave comments (which might be filtered or deleted by the journal owner) to gain rank.

Forgot to mention that I think the two other things mentioned in your post - community domains and spam filters - are awesome

[charmian]

I don't know... maybe you can ask in LJ news?

Yeah, that's why I don't feel too exercised about this. But it's not all users either... just the unpaid ones.

I don't think that's the sole reason why. Some of the comment spamming is probably related to spamming LJ users themselves. As for the non-comment spamming, I think a lot of that is related to spam hosting: i.e., the way it works is that bots both register LJ accounts which they fill with links to spam, and they send spam email linking to those accounts, neither of which really involve Google.

Interestingly, people seem more offended by the spam filters on news.