Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2009-05-20 10:22 am
azurelunatic) wrote2009-05-20 10:22 am
Entry tags:
Spam users, and why they're bad!
So I've seen some people are wondering why the upsurge in bot users who don't do anything except post nonsensical entries with spam-links and add people as friends are a problem, if people don't add them back and they do not leave spam-comments in other people's journals. These are the reasons I've identified; there are probably more.
They annoy people, and they have no legitimate reason to be on LiveJournal; their presence is actively against the Terms of Service.
They're using LJ server resources for their own benefit to drive up search engine ratings, at LiveJournal's cost, taking away from the processor time and storage space that would be available to legitimate users, rather than using a domain and hosting they paid for.
They attempt to hoodwink LJ users into giving them money in some cases.
Some of them attempt to lure LJ users into visiting malware-ridden sites and converting LJ users into unwitting zombies in their botnets.
They're taking up namespace; most of the usernames are garble but not all of them.
They're taking up people's time, granted only a few seconds at a time, but these little things add up.
They're forcing LJ support to handle people complaining about them.
They're diverting developers' effort from things that are more useful to the userbase.
They're taking Abuse time and energy to research and suspend, which takes away from Abuse time and energy spent on other issues.
They make it damned hard to find any real human on http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml
They need to die with fire.
They annoy people, and they have no legitimate reason to be on LiveJournal; their presence is actively against the Terms of Service.
They're using LJ server resources for their own benefit to drive up search engine ratings, at LiveJournal's cost, taking away from the processor time and storage space that would be available to legitimate users, rather than using a domain and hosting they paid for.
They attempt to hoodwink LJ users into giving them money in some cases.
Some of them attempt to lure LJ users into visiting malware-ridden sites and converting LJ users into unwitting zombies in their botnets.
They're taking up namespace; most of the usernames are garble but not all of them.
They're taking up people's time, granted only a few seconds at a time, but these little things add up.
They're forcing LJ support to handle people complaining about them.
They're diverting developers' effort from things that are more useful to the userbase.
They're taking Abuse time and energy to research and suspend, which takes away from Abuse time and energy spent on other issues.
They make it damned hard to find any real human on http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml
They need to die with fire.
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I'm actually about to turn off notifications for being friended because of them. I'm just TIRED of it.
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HOW do I turn that off? I can't find it, and can't find it in Help either.
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Eventually the signal to noise ratio will get so bad that new folk will be totally put off to coming here and older folk will flee to find a place with fewer bots.
Bots don't pay for accounts, and as they aren't human, they aren't looking at the ads, either. So they take up server resources with no return.
The very fact that bot accounts are possible indicates a very serious security breach, putting to question the safety of us real humans journals. If they can write a script to do that...what else are they capable of?
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The accessibility/no-bots tradeoff is a killer. :(
Hmm, though, just juggling the fields around into a different order might ... no, they'd still be labeled the same.
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