AVINASH 2.0

MyBlogLog, Navaratri, etc.

Past and Future

1). Sorry to say that tomorrow, I’m going to spend hours leaving spammers’ communities over at MyBlogLog.

‘Sorry’ because I didn’t want to offend some people by leaving their communities. I’ve liked reading their blogs and learned a few things too but the problem is that if you’re not ready to understand my problem, why should I understand yours? You just don’t understand that there are gazillions of people who already have enough money to buy whatever they want to buy. They don’t need your free gifts worth $1000 or even $10,000.

I waited and waited and waited.. more than one, two or three months, to see what MyBlogLog does to control SPAM. Got nothing in return. Now I’ve really lost all the strength to digest “promotion” messages. I kept my words to not spam any of my MyBlogLog community members and I’m glad that many people who left comments in this old MyBlogLog thread did the same.

My community members can be dead sure that if Avinash has to promote his blog/websites, he’ll prefer investing money in programs like AdWords instead of pissing people off by sending self-promotional crap. Months ago, when I went against the MyBlogLog bulk-messaging feature, many MyBlogLog supporters wrote that the folks at MyBlogLog did good by introducing the bulk-messaging feature. It’ll force “spammers (the MBL members who joined over 300 communities)” leave many communities because a person can’t read so many blogs, can’t interact with 1000s of people, etc.

Who the hell are you to decide who can read how many blogs?! Anyway, let’s forget this ’cause it doesn’t matter anymore. I track over a thousand blog feeds so I’m a spammer. Funny thing is that I’m saying sorry before leaving your communities. I shouldn’t because you’ll be happy if a ’spammer’ leaves your MBL communities. So here we go… Tomorrow, I’ll leave all the communities who have sent promotional crap my way. I want to see my MyBlogLog profile clean. Now it doesn’t matter if I have to leave 75% or even 90% communities to keep my profile clean. If you’re a member of BlogCatalog, send me your community URL. I’ll be more than happy to join your community, i.e., if I’ve some spare time to kill.

2). Too many subscribers maybe wondering why am I not posting new posts. If you’re one of them, forgive me for ignoring you for more than 10 days. I’ve been busy building a beowulf cluster for one of my projects. Had to install and configure Slackware on 20+ workstations. It may take a few more days to make everything fully functional for the project. I’ve been slacking so much that I may start writing about Slackware on this blog.

I didn’t spend all these days installing and configuring Slackware though. My body, mind and soul was pretty bored of computers so I spent hours with nature in the past 7 or 8 days. A complete self-reboot! Now I’m feeling way better.

3). My “news river” project is stuck somewhere in the Internet tube!

4). I’ve a tiny surprise but I won’t mention a word about it. Reason? I always fail to finish my personal projects at time!

5). Happy Navaratri, my Indian readers!

6). Check out Soup.io, an amazing Tumblr alternative. I’ve been using it for one of my eLife streams and really like it. It imports links from my del.icio.us, StumbleUpon (both reviews and thumbed-up links), ma.gnolia, Pownce, Twitter and other social bookmarking accounts. Almost any feed works with Soup.io. You can also import your Tumblr blog posts.

MyBlogLog Mass Messaging Update

This is just a quick post to let my readers know that MyBlogLog has finally heard the voices of all the people who were against MBL’s new community messaging feature and wanted an option to opt-out of community messaging. Now, if you go to your MyBlogLog EDIT PROFILE area, you’ll find the option to opt-in or opt-out of community messages.

If some of you don’t have any idea what I’m writing about, read my previous post on MyBlogLog Community Messaging.

To be honest, I had started to lose hope because they made huge delay in adding an opt-out option even after making a statement like this:

3) We’re not going to make any immediate changes. We released community messaging last night and an hour later there was some pretty vocal criticisms. It’s pretty tempting to just start making changes left and right in an attempt to make things better. But that way lies madness. We’re going to leave it in the wild for a week, let people give us feedback, and make some decisions. And in case you’re creating your posting schedule for next week, we’re going to give more weight to the things people say after living with it for a week than people who see it and respond today (positive or negative).

Anyway, I’m glad that they at least heard our voices. There are still a few things that require heavy modification (e.g. they should make all the community-messages private if they really want to control SPAM) but as far as I’m not getting tons of unsolicited emails, it’s fine with me.

[tags]MyBlogLog[/tags]

MyBlogLog Mass Messaging – Swallow SPAM or DIE

Surprised by reading the heading of this post? If you are really surprised, visit the official MyBlogLog blog and read their recent announcement about the newly added Community Messaging feature.

Read what they did:

we added one other feature that you will probably love. Due to popular demand, we have made it possible to send messages to your entire community in one quick step.

Yeah, right. Popular demand? Only they know! They completely forgot that their new feature addition (i.e. Mass Messaging in one quick step) is going to create a big trouble for many MBL members who hate SPAM and commercial promotion games. Trouble? But wasn’t this new feature addition supposed to be a life-saver for MBL members? Please be calm! Have some drinks while I explain why this new mass-messaging feature is a big pain in the a**.

MyBlogLog Since January 2007:

1). If you have been a MyBlogLog member since its early days, you know how nicely spammers abused it and how MyBlogLog folks tried to hide their sin by banning some people. Later, Shoemoney got unbanned when his fans/buddies started writing against MyBlogLog. Eric accepted that he screwed up but notice his words.

2). This past March, MyBlogLog team started limiting its members to join only 15 communities and add 15 contacts during any day. Why? According to them, it was the solution to get rid of spammers. Great! Maybe one of my readers will explain how spam and spammers can be controlled by taking this step.

They also announced that they’ll set up a comment approval system where community members can automatically post messages and everyone else’s comments gets queued for approval. Is this feature live yet? I dunno because I still see people posting spam on my MyBlogLog profile page and there is *ZERO* option to block ‘em.

In my opinion, MyBlogLog needs a strict comment moderation system (similar to WordPress comment moderation).

3). Now they release this Mass Messaging feature and say that it was a ‘popular demand’. And let me tell you that this feature allows any MyBlogLog community owner to send promotion messages to all the community members in just a few seconds. So far, I’ve received total 42 messages both in my inbox and over at my MBL profile page. Wanna see an example of these promotion messages? Here you go:

To read more spam messages, you should visit my MyBlogLog profile.

Now if you go to Eric and ask what should you do to stop spam, they’ll suggest to leave the spammer’s community. Another nice way to hide your sin, no? ;-) Learn these tricks from these MBL guys, will come handy someday. :D

When a few people, including me, Meg of Blogpond, Ilker of The Thinking Blog and Andy Beard of Niche Marketing left comments over at the official MyBlogLog blog to let the MBL folks know that their new feature release sucks and is an invitation to spam, they posted another post that was a slap in the face of every MBL member who has joined more than 300 communities.

If you have joined 300 and more MBL communities, it’s time to visit their official blog and ask why didn’t they write in their ToS that everybody who joins more than 300 communities may get insulted in the future. If you don’t write against this Mass Messaging stuff, they might never stop insulting their members.

I say, they built a platform to discover new, interesting blogs and join the communities. By asking to leave communities everytime someone sends a promotion messages, what are you trying to prove, Mr. Eric and the whole MBL team? What are you trying to prove by making statements like this:

4) So far, the majority of criticisms come from people in 300 or more communities. They are worried about the potential for spam and heck, I hear you. I’d be worried too. I’ll leave it for other people to debate why someone would join 5,000 communities and focus instead on pure numbers. The vast majority of our users belong to a couple dozen communities that they have a genuine interest in and wish to take part in. I’m not going to get all Spock on you and talk about the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few (or the one), but it does impact our thinking.

Are you trying to prove that your own creation has become a big trouble for you? Are you trying to prove that you’ve a no-talent team that can never come up with a solid idea that really works?

To the readers who think that I’m the only person who is being red and yellow on this new mass-messaging feature release, you should visit the links provided below:

1). MyBlogLog New Features: The Abusive And The Incomplete – Andy Beard

2). Community Messages on MyBlogLog – A Spammer’s Delight | Blogpond

3). MyBlogLog messaging system and why I think it sucks | Yack Yack

4). Marsh | disassociated.com

5). MyBlogLog’s New Messaging Feature [added - 03:46 PM (IST) GMT +05:30] – Lis says that the newly added messaging feature has to be her least favorite out of the recent MBL feature announcements.

6). New Community Messaging Feature at MyBlogLog – [added on 12:05 AM (IST) GMT +05:30] – Christy of Writer’s Reviews has written a post explaining why she dislikes this new MBL mass messaging feature.

7). Think Twice Before You Launch A New Service – MyBlogLog | Smart Wealthy Rich – [added - 07:26 PM (IST) GMT +05:30] – Mr. Jonathan has written a cool post explaining why MyBlogLog Mass Messaging feature is not good for your health.

8). Read what Mr. Sterling of Chip’s Quips has to say about this Mass Messaging feature. [added - 04:16 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

9. Does Anyone Like MyBlogLog’s Community Messaging Tool? A wonderful post written by Michael Garrett over at Profy. You should read this post no matter if you like or dislike MyBlogLog’s newly launched community messaging feature. [added - 08:57 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

10. Snoskred’s Commitment Not To Spam Via MyBlogLog – Yet another intelligent post. [added - 09:02 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

11. MyBlogLog Community Mass Message SPAM Controversy – In this post, Alex makes some valid and highly strong points. A must read for any MyBlogLog member. [added - 03:38 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

12. MyBlogLog Is Now Promoting Spam – An article written by Matthew C Keegan of The Article Writer. About the Mass Messaging feature, Matt writes, “What could be a good idea is really a bad one”. [added - 07:19 PM (IST) GMT +05:30]

13 MyBlogLog: Enabling Spammers – A wonderfully written post by Sephy. He explains how the mass messaging feature can be used by scammers. [added 06:38 PM (IST) GMT +05:30] latest addition

More to come. I’ll keep you up-to-date for the next one week. And while you are active on this blog, head over to MyBlogLog Suggestion Board and vote for an option to opt out of community messages. Please. It’s good for every cool MyBlogLog member.

BTW, what do YOU think about this new community messaging feature? Don’t you think that there should be an option to moderate these messages before they make their way to our MyBlogLog profile pages? Please do let me know if the new messaging feature is a life-saver or a pain in the a**!

Update: Shoemoney a.k.a. Jeremy Shoemaker, according to his comment, is still banned. I’ve started digging deeper and will be posting a detailed post on MBL’s SPAM-Rich history. You’ll be able to read this post soon after MyBlogLog team posts its final decision about Mass-Messaging feature over at MyBlogLog blog. Stay tuned.