Orkut Declares War On Scrapbook, Forum Spam

After enabling users to block unwanted messages in their Orkut scrapbooks, it looks as if Google is taking more aggressive measures to remove spam from community forums, as well as scrapbooks.

(Official Orkut Blog) While communities provide a great medium for people to come together and share ideas through forums, polls and events, lots of communities can be the target of spam. Until now, if you were not the community owner or moderator, you couldn't remove the spam if you saw it. Well that has changed. Now you will be able to click "report spam" to specific topics or items in communities that are spammy, even if you are not the community moderator or owner. This will help us take down spam faster and take the pressure off the community owners and moderators. You can also report spam on specific scraps that you see in your own scrapbook.

Google is probably doing this in response to the rise in scrapbook spam, which has been increasing due to the various "scrap all your friends" hacks available in certain programs or by various scripts.

Before this feature, users had to actually visit the offending person's profile and write up a complaint, which was 30 seconds too long in my honest opinion.

Now all a user has to do is check mark the offending scrap...



...and report it as spam.



Note: Since more often than not my scrapbook is spared from spam attacks, I decided to use a scrap from Fire Ball as an example...even though its not spam.

The one for forums is similar, although Google may want to enable users to report individual community posts instead of the whole thread as spam--unless Google feels like reading the entire conversation. ;-)

Content Copyright 2005-2007 of Inside Orkut. All Rights Reserved. Violators (and hosts) can be prosecuted under national and international laws.