Two New Tools in the Fight Against Spam: No Follow & Soft Blocking

[Eric Suesz]

We’ve been working hard to remove the ability for spambots to penetrate your Ning Network with bogus accounts. Beginning today, we have two new weapons in our arsenal: No Follow and Soft Blocking. These new approaches should make Ning even more safe and secure for your members. 

No Follow

Spambots attempt to create as many fake accounts as possible, which then attempt to post as much content as possible. Any content that is posted by a spambot will, of course, contain a link to some Web site somewhere. The more links a spammer can build up, the higher up in search those spammy links travel in Google search — until they are ultimately near the top of Google’s search results, competing side-by-side with legitimate businesses. 

One way to take away this incentive for spammers is to add a special tag which tells Google to ignore such links when compiling their search results. This is the “nofollow” tag. With No Follow, links work fine. Click on them and you’ll still go to the same place, but those clicks won’t be calculated in Google’s search results. This thwarts one of the major reasons behind a coordinated spam attack. It can be very effective. 

How will this affect your Ning Network? The No Follow tag will be added to all links posted by members on blogs (including comments), forum posts (including comments), and profile comments. There are a few key exceptions:

• Links from NCs and admins won’t get the No Follow tag. Obviously, there’s no danger of you posting spam on your own Ning Network, so the No Follow tag won’t be added to any of your links. 

• Links on the Main Page won’t get the No Follow tag. We want to ensure your Main Page loads quickly for your members and avoid performing any additional analysis that could affect your Main Page’s performance. 

Soft Blocking 

One of the unfortunate side effects of beating spam is that occasionally the rules that are created to catch spammers can catch a legitimate member. We’ve had reports of this, and we take it very seriously. We’re doing our best to ensure members aren’t blocked from using Ning even if their account is flagged in error. To help combat it, we’ve instituted soft blocking.

In the past, when suspicious accounts have been blocked for an excessive rate of posting, the account has been prevented from signing in to Ning. Now, when an account is blocked for excessive posting, that account will be prevented from adding comments, updates, blog posts, forum posts, and photos and videos — content. However, navigation and browsing won’t be affected, just the ability to post content. After a set amount of time, a soft-blocked account will be allowed to post again. Most important: Anyone who experiences a soft block will receive a clear error message, along with information on how to proceed. 

Of course, if you ever have problems signing in or participating on your Ning Network for any reason, we encourage you to open a Help Center ticket, and our advocacy team will investigate the details. 

[AjIt█▬█( Logic Gate™ )]

What is the use of an administrator or moderator in Ning Network..?

Today had an attack in our ning network form a person in chat room (Chat room spaming).

The moderator suspended him nothing was happend in there. He spammed our chat room continuously around two hours.

Then our administrator deleted his profile. Yet he can spam in that chat window continuously.

Finally we have disabled chat room feature in our network noting was happened, he can continue flooding in chat room until his browser reload..

Why this type of security issue arise in Ning networks?

If we block a person in chat or anywhere he can continue with network after clearing his browser cache and cookies.

This is one of the main Bugg in Ning networks. If we banned a profile he can acess network after clear cookies.


More than 250 chat users in our chat room at a time. We want an explanation for this issue.


We are paying that much amount what you say. Yet this type of buggs.


Then what is the use of spam filters ?

Soln :

1. If a person try to flood in chat room just we want to ban him from Ning server not from client side (That Suspension shuld be affect in server too).

2. Want content filter in chat room too.

3. If we block a person in chat room never his entries come to main window hop that can be done in server side.

4. Please avoid Suspend a profile using cookies...

Is any Flooding bots can access Ning Chat room like yahoo flood bots.....

[Sukadev Bretz]

Hi Eric,

please give NC's the choice to use the no-follow attribute on NING or not. These kind of restrictions are useless. I can suspend spambots from my network and don't need these tools.

Thanks,
S.

[George Vasu]

Getting hit hard by these spammers

 

@costinluis.com

 

anything that we can do to - stop them

[Chris]

Make sure you "suspend for spam" these members.

Go to "my network" -> "Member controls"

• Moderate new members.
• Require a verified email address to sign up.
• Require a captcha on sign up
• Require a simple test on sign up that only non-spammers would know (e.g. for a fishing site ask what bait you'd use for a trout etc.)

Try this for a while, you might be able to turn these off again when the spammers realise your network's to much of a pain!

[Joe Fulton]

This works very well on our network (theosnet.ning.com). 

Our admins have been trained to know what to look for.  A captcha will not work by itself anymore.  You need to have something that requires a simple, coherent answer, preferably relevant to the site.  Also, if someone decides on a snarky response to the sign-in question, they get treated as if they were a bot.

[SweetPotato]

Do we have control over no-follows yet? i just had this email from a member

"I’ve just come across your website, which seems a very interesting idea.

 

However, on a quick look, all the external links seemed to have “no follow” enabled.  Doesn’t this entirely undermine any SEO benefit members might otherwise achieve?"

Not sure what to say to him.

[Ralph Paglia]

Is there any way to create a member status that does not have full admin privileges but whose comments are not tagged as "no follow" links?

Also, are all Ning network members blog and forum posts treated the same as NC and Admin's in regards to SEO impact?

[Pat Howlett]

Any update on a NC's ability to take control of whether to allow no-follow or not? 

Many of us operate mature, stable and well administered networks now. Many of us have members who have been with us for as long as we've been with Ning... years. 

If a network is having issues with Spammers there are tools in place to assist them on managing that - if a network does not have these issues and would like for a member to benefit from "their" contributions they should have that control.

Would love this decision and power to be turned back over to the NC. Thanks!