I have some experience in fighting off intentional internet crime of a few
different types so I have that mentality and I'm interested in stop spam. I
love
creating systems to catch the bad guys and I've been successful at it in a few
different arenas.
Types of spam being targeted:
1. Forum/comment/website/blog spam
2. Video spam (youtube)
3. Basically most spam but not email spam.
Basic idea: USE the eyes of the public. The public is the target of spam.
They're the ones that see it. Let THEM take care of the spam problem. They will
be happy to do so.
All we need to do is this: Let 3 established users of that website flag the
spam
and hide it. If reporters abuse this feature, their accounts will be canceled
or
suspended so they have to be sure its really spam. Only let users with a
certain
account age flag spam (3 or 6 months, for example). People with new accounts
can
also flag it but it doesn't hide it right away. Instead it goes into an Spam
approval que where more experienced users can take action. The problem is
complex because these are human spammers so the solution has to be significant
as well.
Scenario: Spammer posts comments on message board. 3 people flag it and its
deleted automatically and the spammer's account is disabled. It can be renabled
in case of a false alarm and if the user confirms they're not a spammer. No
system is perfect but if it stops 95% of the spam coming in, its good enough.
Spammers will realize that its simply not worth it if only 3 people can see
their message and have the account disabled.
This would work for Yahoo messenger also. 3 people flag an account as spam and
that's it. Different checks and balances can be created to take care of
different "what if" situations.
Create a central website for example "flag the spam.com" (FTS). This is how it
would work: On every piece of user created content (comments, videos), there is
a "report" button, that makes a link to the FTS site. For example there's a
spammer on Facebook or Youtube. When the FTS site receives reports from 3
people, it sends back an email to the website reporting the spammer's
username).
Facebook/Youtube automatically takes immediate action, deletes the comments and
spam and disables the user account. The flag icon (looking like a trash can
icon) would become a universal "report spam" symbol. Website owners could
either let FTS do the work, or buy the software from FTS to install it on their
websites. I've thought of creating a system like this and testing it out on
smaller websites to the bigger ones can see it really works.
As mentioned, checks and balances could be created to take care of security
and
false alarms as much as possible. Secure keys and codes can be exchanged to
make
sure messages being exchanges are genuine and not fake. When there is so much
spam going around, even if 3% of all reports are false, its still ok.
For spammers who create fake blogs or websites for traffic generation, the
same
approach can be used to send reports to Google so their site can be excluded
from searches. The goal once again: Make spam reporting quick and easy for the
public.
This is not true right now. Its difficult to report a certain website to Google
for spam. Similarly, Facebook spam gets reported to admins who take action.
Thats slow and there arent enough admins. Its very hard to report spam comments
on Yahoo news. Also, action taken is slow.
For email spam, let each email server obtain an anti-spam certification which
means, they take action against people who spam. Anyone who doesnt have that
certification, will get a "spam" point meaning, their email will be more easily
caught in spam filters. This creates a motive for email server admins to get
certified. Black listed email servers which dont take any action against should
not be entertained by other servers. They'll be left out of the internet cloud
with no choice but to fix themselves. A system can be created to take care of
cheats and other things.
Email spam is 95% of all emails sent. We cant fix this serious problem without
having a serious solution.
Does anyone have any thoughts?
Steven
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