February 23, 2007

Digg Upgrades Spam Armor, Unblocks Sites

Michael Arrington

31 comments »

Digg has started to unblock many sites that were previously banned for “bad behavior,” which usually consisted of a suspiciously high number of stories making it to the home page. If too many stories were buried by people voting it down, or too many users otherwise complained, a site was banned, most of the time permanently.

But previously banned sites are now quietly being let back on to Digg, and people are noticing.

The reason? Based on a conversation I had with Digg founder Kevin Rose recently, Digg thinks they are winning the war over the problem of “grouping” behavior (where groups of Digg accounts are controlled or effectively controlled by a person or group and can push stories to the home page). The changes they’ve made to Digg over the last few months, Rose says, allow them to monitor grouping behavior and stop it before it can drive a story to the home page. Thus, there is no real need to ban any particular site from Digg. They are confident that if a story from a previously banned site makes it to the home page, it deserves to be there.

Digg is such a huge traffic driver that sites will continue to try to find ways of getting to the home page no matter what hurdles Digg puts in place to stop it. But the fact that they are unbanning sites en masse means that they are confident they have in under control, at least for now.

Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 9:32 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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February 25th, 2007 at 9:32 pm

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Comments

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Steve

February 23rd, 2007 at 10:08 pm

It will be interesting to see how those who were banned respond with diggs, as well as the strongholds that seem to control diggs on digg.
steve

February 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 pm

I wish them good luck with banning - but as google has not been able to keep spam out of their index with all the resources that they can throw at it - I am pretty sure clever people will be able to still make it that there stories make it to the home page -

It will be interesting to see how long before sites and or users start getting banned again
baron

February 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 pm

I hope they take a saner approach to self-promotion and over-enthusiastic readers posting a blog content.

Now if they do something about the “bury brigade” things will really get better.
RBA

February 23rd, 2007 at 10:37 pm

A site (should) earn being banned because content in general is objectionable (say pornotube), in which case, the “grouping” behavior should have nothing to do with it. If groups of people are doing things they shouldn’t, shouldn’t have the focus been originally on user behavior rather than in blocking sites? Otherwise you’re killing flies with a sledge hammer…
Paul Stamatiou

February 24th, 2007 at 12:09 am

As baron said, they also need to worry about the bury brigade. Nonetheless, my domain was among those unbanned.
Oobie Doobie Kanoobie

February 24th, 2007 at 12:53 am

I disagree with Steve making the comparison between googles spam problems and diggs. Because digg works on different principles to a search index they should be able to write algorithms to detect and defeat most spam
Dave Naffziger

February 24th, 2007 at 1:03 am

It actually looks like all of the permanently banned domains have been unbanned.

On Monday I did an analysis which found 183 sites in the Alexa top 10,000 that were banned by Digg. (the story hit the Digg homepage and was subsequently buried).

I just reran the 183 banned domains, and it looks like all but 6 of them were unbanned. I won’t paste the full 177 unbanned domains here, but you can find all 183 domains here:
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/.....d-by-digg/

and the 6 still banned domains here:
http://www.naffziger.net/blog/.....e-domains/

Based on Digg’s ban messages, there are three types of bans. It looks like all of the ‘permanent ban’ sites have been unbanned, while the ‘temporary ban’ sites remain banned for now.
Ajay

February 24th, 2007 at 2:50 am

Unbanning shows that maybe Digg is listennig to the majority? But, will this stop the “bury mafia” from not getting the sites banned again?
Ashish Mohta

February 24th, 2007 at 3:54 am

Guess finally they understand the fear.Nothing stands if you monopolize.That happened with microsoft .There is too much still going on, I have seen in forums people being paid for digging, they mark the blog submission as “/blog”..May i know the reason.I agree that sploggers made it happen but dont they have eye to judge.Running a big enterprise bring responsibilities.Bu they just bury the blogger news.Blogging will and is creating a difference…..better they learn to judge..else hatred is what will kill digg.Sooner or later
Everton

February 24th, 2007 at 4:24 am

usually consisted of a suspiciously high number of stories making it to the home page.

As one of the sites that have been granted a ‘reprieve’ I’d just like to point out that the reason we were getting banned was usually because Digg used to just add up the number of buries a domain got and once it hit that number the domain was buried, not because Digg was getting gamed by us.

The buries were accumulated usually because:

(i) because our readers were submitting too many of our posts, which were in many cases rightly getting buried as they weren’t worthy of the homepage
(ii) Digg (in the past) didn’t have adequate duplicate url protection so articles were being submitted repeatedly by users e.g I had one post that hit the homepage 3 times in two months
(iii) There was a group of digg users who were deliberately getting blogs banned
liberta-togo.com

February 24th, 2007 at 4:28 am

How soon will Techcrunch get banned ? since alot of techcrunch posted end up on the front page and some users complain about having too many techcrunch stories appear.

Anyone taking bets ?

Liberta-Togo.com
Kendall

February 24th, 2007 at 4:50 am

I still cannot register on Digg with a sneakemail addresss. Oh well…
How to start a clothing line from scratch

February 24th, 2007 at 7:38 am

only time will tell…Mike I know you know all about that high traffic driver called Digg???
jccalhoun

February 24th, 2007 at 8:00 am

I wish them luck but more and more I see digg full of spam. This alleged “bury brigade” needs to start working over time in my opinion. I can’t tell you how lame it is to see a story on the front page that is obviously nothing more than some loser who found a story, posted it on their own blog and then submitted their blog to digg.

There are entirely too many lame bastards on digg who spend all their time paraphrasing press releases and only submit stories to their own lame sites and don’t digg or comment on other people’s stories. If more users would join this alleged “bury brigade” and take two seconds to see if a story is actually original to that site or the submitter is a spammer then the quality of digg would improve dramatically.
Amy Wilsch

February 24th, 2007 at 9:19 am

Am I the only person on the planet who thinks Digg is interesting but turns me off as seems to be full of a bunch of self aggrandizing egomaniacs? Just asking….
David Mackey

February 24th, 2007 at 10:34 am

This is great news. My site was one that was banned and it has been months since anyone has been able to Digg me, but I just checked and I am now unbanned!
Ronald Lewis

February 24th, 2007 at 11:39 am

One thing I never got about the digg community is the definition of “blog spam”. Bloggers (like myself) have submitted original material and it’s buried as spam? I never quite understood the logic in that.

The folks over at Digg are a great bunch, but they will never be able to prevent abuse. Someone will always find a way around things.
Carsten Cumbrowski

February 24th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

It’s funny how things go. I was writing up an article regarding the ban’s as response to to David Naffziger’s Ban List with over 180 sites. I wanted to take a screen shot of the Digg error message if you attempt to submit a news story located on a banned domain when the message did not appear and the story was posted instead.

I had to rewrite my story a bit, but several, if not most of the points I wanted to make are still valid, even with the lift of bans.

See the story here:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=4446

Cheers!
Go Away Digg

February 24th, 2007 at 3:26 pm

How can Digg be considered a real company? My dog can game this website.
Drama 2.0

February 24th, 2007 at 3:35 pm

I agree with Amy that Digg is interesting but frankly I’m getting tired of hearing about it. 2 of the 6 stories on the first page of TechCrunch are about Digg. For a company that is apparently unable to convert the colossal amount of traffic it claims to profitability, let alone a notable amount of revenues, I think it’s by far the most over-hyped prominent Web 2.0 startup out there.
Paula Mooney

February 24th, 2007 at 7:46 pm

I think Digg banned me and John Chow originally because of our avatars — I doubt that it had a lot to do with SEO or blog spam…

Either way, I’m glad we’re both back in.

The DiggNation has been brought to their senses and realizes the bad rep they were getting (over payola to Digg stories, banning, etc.) might’ve hurt their buyout chances.
free wii

February 24th, 2007 at 9:50 pm

Let’s hope this new anti-spam thing works, but I doubt it.
Adsense Engineer

February 24th, 2007 at 10:01 pm

Tips: Never ban anyone in the forum. Otherwise Adsense companies will cut off 55% revenue from you. Adsense companies can keep 55% of your check. Read the all adsense guidelines.

Don’t click your own ads, don’t do anyting illegal, don’t put your power on adsense companies, etc…
SorenG

February 24th, 2007 at 10:29 pm

Is this really news? If Digg makes the least change whatsoever (or even considers it), it is posted on Techcrunch as breaking news. Why not start a separate blog just for Digg, and keep TechCrunch on more overall relevant news. Feels more like a Digg watchdog than an overall news site.
Alex

February 25th, 2007 at 1:14 am

Digg is still a young site, and many things will happen before they figure out the balance of how to run things.
bernie

February 26th, 2007 at 8:08 pm

Trackback didn’t take. I linked to you from I died in less than 4 hours on DIGG
Shawn

March 16th, 2007 at 5:06 am

Dis shyt is real rite lil bra……………..3@5T5TID3 793