When you get a site on OurLocality you will notice a number of anti Spam measures. They are there to protect you and your readers. The visible measures (the requirement for codes and email obfuscation) are backed up by a clutch of hidden tools to constantly monitor and remove Spam.
Spam isn’t just the stuff that invades your email box. It manifests itself as websites masquerading as genuine blogs, with no other purpose than to peddle a product or service aggressively or inappropriately. The illegitimate site typically insinuates itself into our news stream and provides no added value. It also appears as sometimes cleverly as quite plausible commentary on an article (often flattering or simply asking a question, and always carefully concealing a link to another site). Clever spam is often humanly created and will be topical, so the reader won’t easily recognise it as such.
So, we are on the look out for new and old sites that look like they have been established purely for advertising purposes. e.g. :-
- Sites created simply to advertise another one (there will be cases when this is legitimate – we are not against self-promotion per se!)
- Sites that that remain “under construction” yet are public
- Sites created but the admin email address remains unverified
- Sites with discussion settings open, but unmoderated and collecting spam
To avoid your site falling foul of the rules, follow these steps:
- Do not make your site public before it is ready (e.g. you have not removed the default Post and Page and replaced them with your own)
- Do not use www in the title of your website to advertise another site
- Update your site regularly, don’t let it atrophy (why are you creating it?)
- Do not copy and paste or duplicate content across your sites, it is boring to see the same stuff cropping up all over no?
- Do not infringe copyright or plagiarise, we’ll suspend your account sharpish.
- Tighten or relax the discussion settings according to how often you are going to moderate comments (not got time? just turn ’em off)
- Don’t fill your site up with adverts or affiliate links. These are against the terms of service.
- If you are promoting a business however small, provide detailed contact information e.g. an email address on a public account like hotmail may not convey sufficiently to your customers that you are a bona fide operation.
So, it is not just viagra ads and the usual inappropriate content (e.g. offensive, encouraging violence etc) that we are looking for.
Our website owners are free to publish pretty much anything else, subject to our general Terms of Service.
If you want to find out more about SPAM check these references
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html?pg=7
If you consider that we have acted too fast or just gone too far, we are reasonable people, just get in touch via the usual channels and we will take another look at your problem.