Archive for the ‘spam’ Category

Maybe you have noticed that Bacon is taking over the internet.  Its a weird and quirky little trend that is dripping grease everywhere.  Its also relatively aromatic in a Waffle House kind of way.

Here are a few examples of Bacon hostages.

PayU2Bacon

Change we can Bacon

White House Acon

WebBacKonz

Giant Snakes Bacon on CNN

How did this Bacon get everywhere?

Well it would seem that the source of this lard farce is http://bacolicio.us/.  They haven’t done a lot of work, nor have they done anything that would make any pig feel terrific.  Instead they are hamming up the internet with bacon, by inserting their own url before other urls like the unfortunate examples above. 

You can have fun with it yourself, just insert http://bacolicio.us/ + any other full url in your address bar, hit enter and walla! You just tagged the site with a side of bacon.

Running a website and keeping control over user generated content is not easy.  Even Google News has a hard time keeping relevant news articles from displaying something crazy, wacky, or borderline inappropriate.

The bottom line is that if you have a site that enables content to be collected in an automated fashion or provided by users or some other large block of people or companies, you need to have the editorial control and ability to monitor your site and take action quickly when something gets through.

Something will always get through, the key is to being able to adapt quickly and appropriately.

If you have a site that sells womens gold watches, you do not necessarily want a review to slip through that talks about something that might be inappropriate for your customers.  User reviews historically have been the most common area where spam or lewd comments might slip through.  Many spam blocking tools such as akismet for wordpress solve this problem, but finding a spam tool for images is another matter.

Whether you are Google News trying to enable relative news related captions to appear or a forum that enables users to establish a better connection with other users through avatars, personalized images, you will need to be vigilant for those images or pictures that might be swapped out or replaced.  One of the best controls is to require that images be loaded up to your own server where you can then manually review and approve them.  If you enable ‘hot linking’ (a link to an image hosted on a site out of your control) then a person might submit one image to be reviewed and once approved the person can upload a new image to the same location with the same file name.  The hot link will now be pointing to an image that you did not approve at all and maybe do not want.