Spam me once, shame on you. Spam me twice and it’s time to get better moderators.
For the second time in three days, Digg has become the pitiful victim of a major spam attack on their Top News section. This isn’t the case of a complex algorithm breach or a hidden exploit being passed around the darkest corners of the Internet. The same spam sites that attacked early in the morning on September 26th hit again before midnight on September 28th.
The 4 stories in question were submitted at 10:30 pm Pacific. All four were promoted utilizing a gaping hole of an exploit inherent to V4 (which we will not detail here so as to not give other spammers “The Roadmap to Success on Digg”). The first one was promoted to the front page a little over an hour later with each subsequent post hitting the front page in successive 10-minute intervals.
One of the most controversial changes made when Digg moved to V4 was the removal of the “Bury” feature. The bury button in V3 was a defense mechanism that prevented spam stories from being promoted. Those that slipped through the cracks were normally buried off within minutes by the Digg community.
As of the time of this post, the first spam story was still on the front page over an hour after it was promoted.
Controversy surrounded the bury button as alleged “bury brigades” would abuse it and remove quality content from distribution.
Co-founder and former CEO Kevin Rose has mentioned on multiple occasions that there are moderators employed by Digg to prevent these types of attacks from happening. Despite the removal of the bury button, a “report” button is available on every story to theoretically alert the moderators of content that abuses TOS. There is also a “hide” button that removes the story from view and acts in similar ways to the old bury button.
Neither seem to be very effective.
Seems like they have fixed the issue and removed those posts now..!!
They removed the posts, but I wouldn’t be so sure that they fixed the issue. We’ll see.
But haven’t you noticed half the top stories are their own promoted sponsored spam stories?
That is more than annoying, it’s something I hate about digg.
New Digg sucks. Reddit is the best alternative out there.
/former digg user
“Spam me twice […] For the second time in three days”
If you visit digg that often, I’m afraid they must have been spamming you a whole lot more times than you think.
I would digg this, but I canceled my digg account.
Why in the world would those sites not get banned the first time?
Digg doesn’t do anything anymore. I’m sure you’ve noticed how few comments and diggs articles have. Since digg doesn’t have a community anymore (the most vocal members have left) there’s no one left to moderate this sort of stuff.
I always heard that change comes for the good but digg changes brought the worst change in the internet history as per knowledge. I am sure, Kevin and his team put lots of effort to make this digg as worst as possible and THEY REALLY DID A GREAT JOB.
Thumbs up for the whole digg.com team for such a great achievement!
people just don’t leave anything. Even big sites like digg are prone to spamming.
You have to open a story to report or bury it.
Most of the time spam can be recognized from the main page title.
That’s why I never make it past the main page anymore.
I don’t like digg anymore. Since they have released the new version of digg it is pretty annoying and most of traffic has transfered to reddit from digg. They should inspect this matter immediately otherwise in near future there will be no sign of digg.
I came across http://www.DiigMe.com on http://pulse2.com/2010/09/27/three-power-digg-users-working-on-competitor-out-of-revolt/
it looks like 3 digg power users are starting their own digg site and they just announced on Twitter that thy site will have 8 layers of spam protection
What else I dont understand why id digg not doing anything about it?