MyBlogLog Mass Messaging – Swallow SPAM or DIE
by Avinash
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.
Related posts:
Well put Avi.
I’m up to 31 messages. Hopefully community owners will start taking it upon themselves to use a little self control – especially if they see their communities dwindling in size.
Thanks, Meg!
Currently, I’m not leaving communities whenever the community owners send a message my way because I feel that it’ll make me look rude in their eyes. I’ll wait and watch what everybody else has to say about this new messaging feature. I hope I may control spam for one or two days.
If the community owners still don’t understand, I’m gonna leave their communities as well as remove a few of them from my contact list.
Well said Avi, I updated my post and linked to what you wrote here.
Cheers
Thanks, Rob!
You may want to keep an eye on this post because I’m digging the blogosphere to find each and every post that discusses about this new messaging feature. I’ll continue updating links in this post as I find ‘em.
- Avi
Hey Avi, thanks for the heads up about this post. I’ve updated my post with a link here. I’ve also commented on the MBL blog post. Let’s see if it shows up.
Hey Lis,
Thanks for taking the time to read this post and leave your comment! About the comment left by you over at MBL blog, I think they’ll approve it when they wake up in the morning.
Actually Ilker I believe was one of the ones who wanted a way to contact community members, and with so many community members compared to subscribers, I can understand the personal viewpoint that the benefit outways the negative.
In my mind, although the legal side of this could be quite different, I haven’t given anyone permission to “mass mail” me, other than possibly MBL themselves as I am a member of their service.
There wasn’t a mass mail feature to their service when I signed up.
In the same way I don’t expect to be added to a mailing list when I place a comment on a blog, I also don’t think I am giving them permission when I am autojoined to their community after a few visits.
Andy,
I’m glad you stopped by to leave a comment explaining what you think about this new messaging feature.
Although I had no idea that ilker was one of the people who wanted this feature (and as you’ve already written in your comment, ilker has a big MBL community so I think it’s ok to demand for a better solution), whatever I wrote about ilker in this post was a result of the comments left by everybody over at MBL blog.
And I’m completely agree with you on allowing them to mass mail you. I think that no cool person is going to be happy after seeing sudden appearance of too many crap emails in his/her inbox. My only problem with this new messaging feature is that they didn’t provide us the option to block the messages before they hit our inbox and profile pages.
1,80,000 people (and nobody knows how many of them are human beings) will surely act differently but I don’t know why I am getting this feeling that everybody who has a professional web life is going to write against this feature.
As far as the auto-join feature is concerned, I think it’s a bit fair because they’ve provided us an option to control this feature. But by launching this mass-messaging feature, they have just screwed up things once again. There must be an option to opt out of community messages.
I wasn’t surprised when Eric posted his thoughts about the latest messaging feature over at MyBlogLog blog. I’ve seen this everytime that whenever MBL team screws things up, Eric is never ready to accept his fault in the start. Once again, he’s attempted to do something similar by making his senseless statement in point #4 that’s just going to make him and his team look stupid because it’s really not too hard to think that people are going to misuse this new feature. Any good developer/ web professional could easily think before making such a powerful feature live that a moderation system is must in these type of situations.
Ilker first of all said
And then followed it up with
Ilker uses the standard messaging system responsibly, as an alternative to dropping me an email. I read the thinking blog sporadically because it is not really in my niche and am happy to digg and stumble his content.
I actually worked out a better solution for the permission system, but due to the moderated comments on the MBL blog you will have to wait to read it.
I think I might write a followup post on the subject, but have a very full schedule for the next few days.
Andy,
If I’m not wrong, I think you should check the Typepad comment structure once again. :) Actually, I made similar mistakes once I was gonna post a comment on a Typepad hosted blog.
Actually, ilker posted this (1st comment)
and then:
That’s why Robyn left a comment that:
As you can see, ilker, Avinash, Hammer, Meg and You were against this feature. :) I hope it solves the confusion.
Ack, this just goes to show how much we all look at avatars in a box nxt to a comment these days, or at least I do.
Ilker is certainly against this, and it was my mistake.
What a brilliant post, thanks for including Writer’s Reviews, I appreciate it. It will be interesting to see how MyBlogLog handles this.
Hope you’re enjoying the weekend:)
Avinash,
Thanks for your feedback and for keeping us on our toes. We’ll discuss the Community Messaging tomorrow, after going through all of the member feedback. You have my email address now and if you need anything please email me and let me know.
Hello-
Actually saying that I was a spammer is kind of interesting… You should actually look up the events that lead to me being banned. While you say I was a spammer I never spammed anyone. Also for the record I still am banned (if i goto mybloglog all i get is a blank screen).
Basically we were working with Scott and he approved what me and Andy Beal were doing. Then when Jeremy Z called Andy Beal a spammer is when I stopped communicating with them privately and started to just blog the various holes in my bloglog.
Course not that the facts matter much. I still was probably in the wrong and I expected to be banned. After we found the code that tracks adsense specific clicks including advertisers and all that it was not something I was ever going to run on my site again.
Christy,
You are welcome! :) And yep, I really enjoyed my weekend. Thanks for taking the time to read this post!
- Avi
@Shoemoney: I think there is some confusion.. if you visit the links with the words “spammers, abused it”, and then read the paragraph once again, you’ll realize that I wasn’t pointing my fingers at you when I wrote that spammers abused MBL. Still if you think that it was my intention to call you a spammer, I’m sorry!
By writing:
I was only pointing my finger @ MBL that they tried to cover their mistake by banning you when you were writing about the exploit techniques over at your blog.
I still remember that Andy Beal announced he would boycott MyBlogLog until Schoemaker gets reinstated. I’m sorry once again for any confusion.
Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to leave the comment!
Update: And I wasn’t aware that they banned you once again. Now I’ve started to get this feeling that I’ll need to digg deeper and write a detailed post on MBL and its SPAM history.
- Avi
My pleasure, Robyn! The only problem is that you MBL folks need to add an option to opt out of community messages. I don’t need anything else.
Thank you!
Thanks for writing this post and taking the conversation out of MBL blog into a place where we our comments are displayed instantly. I’m glad to see that quite a lot of people are against this free offering to spammers but I know the intentions of MBL team was not this when they released it out in the wild.
I just wrote another comment on MBL blog that should clear things up a bit:
To which Eric replied:
I don’t know what else to write there.
If people get used to send messages in private (like me), I think it would solve the problem from my point of view. Messages directed at me is good, but I don’t want people to get free publicity for their new website/contest/whatever from my profile.
That, in my opinion, is the difference between announcement and spam.
EDIT: By the way, I’m glad I disabled the “send messages with email” option from the beginning. That way my inbox is more “spam free” than usual.
ilker,
You are welcome! I’m glad that you took the time to let us know your thoughts about the community messaging feature. I’m sure that the people involved in this discussion are going to appreciate it.
As far as Eric and his replies over at MyBlogLog blog are concerned, I think he should accept that by providing no option to opt out of community messages, he has made a mistake. As you already wrote in your first comment over at MBL blog, this step is a warm invitation to spam, spammers and black-marketing types.
I noticed that Eric has asked to many people the same question that what is the benefit of joining a community when one doesn’t want to receive messages from a community owner. I just read his last comment left over at MBL blog:
Doesn’t it sound like he is trying to ignore his own experience with many web portals, mailing lists and bulletin boards? Because in my past 6+ yrs of heavy experience with WWW, bulletin boards, email services (e.g. Hotmail), web development mailing lists and other web based services, I have seen that websites do seek your permission before adding you on any mailing list. No matter if it’s a product promotion mailing list or any software development mailing list, you may have noticed that they do allow you to decide if you want to be added on a mailing list or not.
I know that anybody who has heavy experience in Web industry is not going to support this messaging feature. If MBL tries to build its own law for web communication, many people will leave MBL forever.
wow this is great and I thought my post was the bulk of it but this cuts the cake – I do not think mybloglog will last long if there is continous spam on there
I agree with everyone that is against this new feature. It seems like MBL did not spend enough time to think about the real effects of this change. One of the greatest things about MBL is the ability to connect with others and discover new sites. I love discovering new blogs about all kinds of different topics. I also love to discover the uniqueness of each new writer that I discover.
However, with this new change the desire to promote has completely overtaken the MBL experience. Everyone hopes that my using the new feature they can get a few more hits. In the process they are alienating current community members. This new feature is thus hurting bloggers, instead of helping them.
What is the ultimate point of this feature anyway? It is supposed to be a way to let all of your community members know about something that pertains to them specifically right? Well, why not just have a sticky message or something that you can put on your community page? That way you can write something specific to your community without spamming people.
MBL says that most of their users only belong to a few dozen communities right? If this is the case they can go check out the communities themselves for messages from the community owner. Why do we need to get messages thrown at us?
This new system does nothing beneficial. It simply makes the practice of spamming just that much easier. The thing that I find sad is that people who normally would never think to spam will probably start. Why? Well, if MBL supports something why not do it?
Avi, all I can say is that posts like this make me glad that I gave up on MBL quite awhile ago!
yeah i can see this thing getting annoying really fast.. we’ll see what happens…
maybe I’ll post a message ;)
Avi my friend, another wonderful post. I am very unhappy with this new service and do not see a single benefit. Just because I join a community, does not mean I want to hear from that person several times a day (other than private msg of course).
Thanks for keeping me updated.
@Ian & cottage: Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to let us know your thoughts about this mass messaging feature.
@Andrew: I completely agree with you on the point that people are misusing this mass messaging feature to promote their communities.
I think, it’s not the fault of the MBL community owners if they are using this system as a promotion tool. MBL team made this feature available to them without thinking about the wrong side. They have always been unable to control spam. And instead of trying to control spam, they’re promoting it over at MyBlogLog by releasing this type of features.
I don’t think a single point where there was any need of this feature. ilker has written in his comments (here and over at MBL blog) that if there was a popular demand for this feature, as they said, there should have been an arrangement so all mass messages sent by community owners are private messages.
Alex also made some strong points in his comments over at MyBlogLog blog. But majority of people think that there should be at least one option to opt out of community messages and I’m 100% agree with them.
And yes, if they build a tool that has 110% chance of getting misused, people will certainly misuse it.
Thanks for stopping by!
Tiny, my friend, thanks for finding some time out of your busy schedule to let us know what you think about this mass messaging feature.
You do not see a single benefit and I agree. Even big MBL community owners like ilker and Andy are against this feature. Now I don’t see how it was a popular demand. If a community owner needs better features to interact with his community member, why not release a solid solution instead of releasing an incomplete one that’s plain crap?
I have made a commitment not to spam people using this community messaging system. You can do the same, and also show the little badge on your site to let people know you won’t spam them. I linked to your article about it in my post, too.
Snoskred
http://snoskred.blogspot.com/
Avinash,
In your zeal to collect all opinions on this new feature you seem to be missing those of us who approve of it ;-)
Along with the folks at MBL, I still don’t really see why it should be a problem to receive messages from communities that you have willingly joined (and the “opt in” that everyone is complaining about is implicit in *joining* the community). The examples you cite above of “spam” don’t clear things much. One is from a site that is clearly designed to generate income, with little valuable content, and the other is from a gal who (very reasonably to me) wants to inform her community that her url has changed? I guess I don’t understand why you joined the former site in the first place and the consider the latter communication to be “spam”?
It’s pretty obvious that the reason (some) people are up in arms is because they are finally being asked to *participate* in communities, whereas before “participation” consisted of little more than free advertising of one’s avatar on someone’s MBL page.
The new feature will change the dynamic of MBL from free self-promotion to real community building and I’m all for it.
@ SpragueD,
Before answering your questions, may I ask how many people are “approving” it? If the number of supporters is closer to the number of the people who are against it, I’m ready to link their post from my post. Maybe you saw highly lower amount of people supporting this feature over at MyBlogLog so you started to find publicity? ;) (no pun intended).
The fact is that *only a few* people have supported this feature and in my opinion, they are in the category of ‘exceptions’, nothing much. And about the screenshot, I’ve purposefully posted such a screenshot showing one message full of links (self promotion trick) and the other one who is clearly an innocent message.
If you don’t read many blogs, I suggest you to visit all the blogs where I’ve left comments about this feature explaining it clearly that I don’t want the complete removal of the feature. If people against this new messaging feature are demanding an opt out feature, why is it bothering you *a few supporters*?
And about the “real participation” in a community, I’ll like to say that you need to teach these type of lessons to a blogging beginner who might agree what you say because he will lack proper knowledge of blogging, community, social networking and related stuffs. People who are talking about “real participation” in a blogging community and then talking crap that “people join communities that they have no real interest in” are the people who are damn confused. The people who are chanting only about the meaning of community/interaction and ignoring all the other points ARE the people who either need to support this feature anyhow or they think that they are social marketing genius because they have “real communication channel” made of 20 or 30 people.
Wanna know the fact? If there was no involvement of “feed readers” in a MBL community and only MBL community members were joining MBL communities, most of the BIG MBL communities were too small in the current situation to be noticed. Wanna face the fact? Write a post on your blog saying “You don’t care about your RSS subscribers. They can go to hell because your MBL community is the only thing you care about” and you’ll notice that the next day, your feed subscriber number went down to 3 if you currently have 300 subscribers.
And when you talk about joining a community, will you tell me why didn’t I join a single “wine blog community” if I had to become more visible? Why did I join only technology, seo, marketing, blogging and similar communities that relate to my niche?
SpragueD the opt in you are suggesting is actually weaker in most cases than a single opt-in subscription because many people for convenience use the autojoin feature.
I left the community of blogs that have been in my feedreader for 6 months and I actively read, because I don’t want the emails from them.
At the same time I do want to be able to receive individual notifications from readers leaving a personal message.
I also want to be able to stay in touch with my subscribers, which started to become increasingly difficult once I hit a few 100.
I would have happily used MBL communities as a source of OPML, to feed services like Megite. In the end I am using Technorati after over 6 months of suggesting MBL introduce OPML for communities.
I stopped manually adding myself to communities actively at around 130. I have added a few more manually since then, but most have been automatic based on a few visits.
I am now up to 312 communities.
It makes my readers so happy when I drop by their blogs, and once I have been there a few times they love it when they see me joined to their community.
The autojoin feature is great for people who read your feeds and drop by to comment once in a while, and just forgot to join a community, however they certainly don’t want to be sent email because of it.
I am not a lawyer, but I believe all forms of commercial email has to be informed as such and I also believe there usually has to be a physical mailing address – that is certainly what is recommended by email marketers.
If someone subscribes to my comments, I even have that information in the emails sent out, because my blog is commercial, it has a few adverts and affiliate links, and the occasional paid review on a consultation basis.
Maybe I go a little beyond requirements, but I like being able to deliver my emails.
Most bloggers, and I include in that number most probloggers also have very little knowledge about email marketing rules.
If people are forced to turn off normal messaging because of this, it is one step forward and 2 steps back.
Hello
I can’t be bothered with anything these days, but shrug. I just don’t have anything to say recently.
Bye
Hi Avi,
A quick note to let you know that the team pushed out an update earlier today that gives you the ability to opt-out of Community Messaging email. I’m sorry it took so long, we’ve been working on a ton of things lately and this was the soonest we could get it out there.
The setting is right there at the bottom of your Profile page.
For more details, see my post on the MyBlogLog blog:
http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/at-your-service.html
Ian,
Thanks for adding the opt-out feature! I’ll be writing an update post to inform my readers about this feature addition.