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.
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