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Nipping Spam Accounts in the Bud: Tips for Recognizing and Reducing Spam on Your Site – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Maria Rainier in Featured

In many ways, spam is just a fact of life on the Internet. Many of us get the occasional spam email and have a filter to take care of it. Far and away, the most common example of spam is email spam. While email spam is easy to avoid and relatively harmless, if you’re running a website, you have to try and be more mindful. Spam accounts on forums or even in comment sections can be a real problem. Too many spam accounts can make your site look bad and make new readers wary. Here are a few simple tips to help you nip those spammers in the bud.

The Captcha

One of the oldest responses to spam bots is the captcha. A captcha is a basic response test used to ensure a human answers the question. Normally it’s represented by either an image including letters or a math problem. While a captcha won’t cut out users who are actively trying to create spam, it will keep out bots and that alone will cut down on your spam by a wide margin. Most websites require a captcha when creating a user account, but that’s not enough. I recommend requiring users answer a captcha every time they comment. It’s a little less convenient for the users, but it will do a lot to keep your site clean.

Zero Tolerance

This tip is especially true for forums. Make sure you have a clearly stated zero tolerance policy on spam. If ever you catch users spamming, new or old, ban them. It’s important that the community knows you take the issue seriously and may ward off a few potential spammers. Sometimes this works best if you can make an example out of someone, so at the first chance you get, ban the spammer immediately. Nothing is worse than having an interesting conversation thread ruined by a spammer. Forums, perhaps more than any other type of website, have a lot to lose from huge numbers of spammers. It’s also important to ban the IP, not just the account. While it’s not impossible for them to return when banned by IP, it’s more difficult.

Keep an Adequate Moderating Staff

The larger your community becomes, the higher the chance of being targeted by spammers. It will eventually get to the point where it just isn’t reasonable to keep up with it all yourself. This is where the importance of having a moderator staff comes into play. If you take a handful of dedicated users you feel you can trust and give them basic moderation power, your site may clean up itself. Often these moderators will agree to help out of pure love for the site. Make it clear that you’re looking for volunteers and are unable to pay them. You may be surprised by the community response.

Require an Email Address to Post Comments

Requiring an email address to post comments serves two purposes. The first is warding off spam bots and the second is forcing some responsibility. Often, when any portion of the anonymity of the Internet is taken away, spammers avoid it. It’s still possible to create an account for the sole reason of spamming your site, but it’s likely not worth the effort. If this does happen, make sure to take the email address and add it to a database before deleting the comment. You can then keep a record of this database and use its emails to cut down on spam of other websites you run.

Collaboration

Partner sites and affiliates are the lifeblood of the blogosphere. You can make use of this to avoid spammers using the database mentioned earlier. If you encourage your fellow webmasters to keep up a similar list, you can compare the two and end up warding off more spammers. With a large enough collective, you can create a joint safety net. This net works by protecting the other sites in the collective from any single spammer. While it won’t cut spam out completely, it will do a great job of cutting it back and requires minimal effort to maintain.

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Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and recent graduate of Elon University. She is currently a resident blogger at Online Degrees, where recently she’s been researching different Online Business Administration Programs and blogging about student life. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

Why We Secretly Hate Your Emails (And What You Can Do About It)

By Justin Cooke in Featured

Ok, I admit it…I’ve been a militant emailer for years.

Whether it was requiring updates from employees, discussing strategy with partners, ordering from vendors, etc. I considered my emails as THE way to communicate and get things done, especially when working remotely. I’d get frustrated when emails were ignored or not comprehended and couldn’t understand why other professionals would take them so lightly. Yes, I’d read Tim Ferriss’s 4HWW and knew that some people were trying to cut back on their email consumption, limiting their time responding/sending emails, etc…but they shouldn’t do that to ME, I thought.

What I didn’t realize before starting AdSenseFlippers.com was that some people loathed getting emails from me and their poor response rate was a secret rebellion in protest.

Others have been writing about this as well, including such well-known bloggers as Seth Godin and Chris Anderson giving us email checklists and setting out to create an email charter. We’ve recently begun to build our list of subscribers through Aweber and in doing so, I’ve signed up for quite a few email lists to get an idea as to what kind of information is provided, how often they sell products or services to me, etc. What I’ve found is that over 95% of the emails I receive through their lists are junk. It’s not just that they don’t apply to me or help me out specifically…it’s that they could hardly be considered helpful to ANYONE. I’ve secretly come to despise several of these unnamed sources…especially those who I haven’t yet taken the time to unsubscribe from and it’s hurting their brand much more than it’s helping.

I’m still a little militant about email and I DEFINITELY haven’t got down to checking my email once a week like Tim Ferriss, but I’ve found a strategy of rules I can follow without unintentionally building up a network of people who secretly hate my emails:

Would you want the email yourself? No? Will sending the email potentially make you money…would the person you’re sending this to find it to be valuable information.

If it’s someone with whom you’re looking to do business have you considered what they get out of it and would it be a good deal if you were in their shoes? If it’s to your list, would you really find the information useful or is it just another excuse to promote a product, affiliate program, etc. Be honest with yourself.

Are you including people on the email that don’t need to be included? Does your boss, co-worker, employee, partner really need to have a copy of that email in their inbox?

I’m cc’d on so many emails that I currently don’t even need to know about. This problem alone literally eats up 20-30 minutes of my day, minimum. This is especially useful for subscribers and lists…that email that took you twenty minutes to write and are sending out to a 2,500 strong subscriber base could literally be eating up 800 hours of people’s time or more

Are any attachments or links relevant, useful, and necessary? Expanding on the previous point, it may only take an extra 30 seconds to include a few extra links to videos and articles, but how much time are you asking of your recipients to spend researching that information. (2,500 hours worth in the above example if it takes an hour to digest) Is it really worth it? A few weeks ago I sent a video and associated article to my employees and asked them all to read, watch, and respond with any thoughts they had and told them to do this on the clock, because I knew it was important. Would you be willing to go as far as paying for the time your readers spend reviewing your attachments and links? If not, don’t send it.

So I can’t say I’m down to checking my emails once a week or that everything I send out is award-winning or always useful, but I’ve gotten much more respectful of others’ time. It can become infinitely more difficult to keep up the more successful you become, so remember that the next time you have a business proposition or question for someone that’s doing well and be strategic about it. If they’re respectful of you, they’ll respond…but it doesn’t mean they don’t secretly wish you would have been more succinct and appreciative of their limited time.

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Justin Cooke is an author, business owner, and a general business enthusiast. In addition to running TryBPO, an outsourcing company in Davao City, Philippines, he also creates runs AdSenseFlippers a site devoted to promoting free, actionable information to build niche websites for passive income, providing easy to follow strategies and detailed income reports.
http://adsenseflippers.com/category/income-report/2011

Is Google’s New Email Filtering For You?

By Jerry Bader in Featured

So Google wants to decide for you what emails are important and what emails aren’t. See MediaPost’s ‘Around the Net’ at http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=134756.

From what I’ve read one of the key filtering factors will be addresses or people it recognizes. It seems the Web has spawned this notion that the only people you should communicate with are people and businesses you already know. Linkedin and many other social networking sites follow the same principle only allowing you to connect to people you already know; or to those that you can get introduced to by existing contacts.

Sure spam is a problem, we all know that, but an obsession with spam that is not destructive can be easily dealt with by hitting the delete button or by using spam filters properly. Yes we all get lots of emails that we have to go through every day, but the idea that you should only deal with the people you deal with seems to me counterproductive and frankly, downright foolish.

We are all in business and we all want to grow and expand our businesses by not only selling our current customers more, but by selling new customers. Can a business survive in the long-term without new customers? Of course it can’t.

Anyone who has studied psychology, and when you get right down to it, sales and marketing are all about psychology, knows that ignorance, as in lack of knowledge, leads to poor decisions.
Everyone makes mistakes, the difference between successful business executives and failures, is the ability to learn from mistakes; the problem according to the Dunning-Kruger effect is not knowing what you don’t know creates an ‘illusory superiority’ – in short keeping yourself ignorant makes you feel that you know more than you actually do, and that’s what leads to poor decision-making.

I for one don’t want Google or Linkedin or anybody else for that matter pre-filtering what I should see, hear, read, listen to, or whom I should communicate with. We owe it to our selves and our businesses to think for ourselves, listen to as much as we can, and use our brains to decide if the information is valid or not.

Clients pay us to create Web videos that generate leads, emails, and phone calls that help build working relationships, sales, and long-term customer loyalty. If you don’t answer your phone or read your emails you may have just missed closing your next big client, and that’s not good business.

Thanks Google, but I’ll pass.

Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design and marketing firm that specializes in Web-video Marketing Campaigns and Video Websites. Visit http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com, and http://www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

The Effect of Spam on Business

By Karl Muhlbach in Featured

Spam, or junk email, is one of the largest frustrations for Internet users. For businesses, this frustration adds up to dollars lost and spent trying to prevent it. Reports estimate that spam costs U.S. businesses more than $71 billion in lost productivity annually, which equates to $712 per employee. I’m sure most businesses, especially in the economy’s current state, can think of a better use for those dollars.

The thing that makes spam a unique, and subsequently the reason it increases every year, is that the cost of email is placed on the receiver rather than the sender. With traditional direct-mail, a person or company spends money on every piece sent. Think about the amount of junk mail you receive every day at your home and business. Now imagine if each piece of mail did not have a hard-cost for the sender — we would all need much larger mailboxes.

Spam can also hurt the reputation of your business as well. It is all too easy to “spoof” or fake the email address that an email shows it is being sent from. You certainly do not want customers and clients to receive junk or malware emails with your company’s name in the sender’s address bar. Spoofing email is, unfortunately, very easy to do as it exploits a level of trust that the basic email protocols use. I’m sure when these protocols were initially developed no one envisioned the future of email to be what it is. While there is no full-proof method to prevent email address spoofing, newer methods such as SPF records and the Sender ID framework are working to reduce it. It is important for businesses to put these new safeguards in place, as the sooner the adoption rate increases, the sooner more mail servers will start enforcing them.

Fortunately there are several hardware and software products that can be deployed to protect your business from spam and the security threats they bring. Depending on your email infrastructure, a dedicated-hardware solution may be the appropriate solution. For others, a third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) solution may be a better fit. Don’t worry if you don’t have existing personnel to put these solutions in place, a full-service Managed IT provider can help.

With the number of spam emails being sent increasing every day, it is important to make sure you have the necessary solutions in place to protect and prevent spam.

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Karl Muhlbach is the President of Eukairos Technologies. With more than 20 years experience in Information Technology, Eukairos Technologies can custom design a solution for your small business to ensure all of your IT needs are met and exceeded. www.EukairosTech.com

6 Useful WordPress Plugins to Prevent Spam

By Stacey Zimmerman in Featured

In starting your wordpress, there’s a great possibility to receive spams. Receiving comment spam when first starting a blog can gain such traffic that could be alarming for beginners. For this reasons we don’t have the access to prevent spammers to read our blogs. In just a minute your blog can be spammed by thousands of comments. This article introduces 6 proven useful plugins that is available in wordpress to help you fight and eradicate spam.

yaCAPTCHA

It is a CAPTCHA plugin designed for WordPress, it helps you block comment spam from automated bots. So if you post comments, users have to write down the characters of an image provided. It is planned for automated programs to find it hard figuring out those characters, a great help in preventing comment spam.

Spam Slammed

By Mel Strocen in Featured

If you’ve noticed a sudden decrease in spam hitting your Inbox, there’s a reason. Last Tuesday, after a lengthy investigation, McColo Corp, a Web hosting service based in San Jose, California was shutdown for hosting clients who were engaged in “everything from sending spam to controlling compromised computers around the world and selling knock-off pharmaceuticals”. Reports from various sources estimated that McColo was responsible for as much as 75%  of world wide spam messages. Following McColo’s closure, spam volumes were reportedly down by 40%.  If you’re interested, more information can be found at:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081113.wspam14/BNStory/Technology/home

http://www.straightupsearch.com/archives/2008/11/spam_on_the_run.html

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-spam14-2008nov14,1,4316124.story

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