The Genealogy & Family History Social Network

Spam blog posts take over GenealogyWise

GenealogyWise is a really
dynamic and useful social networking site for genealogists.
GenealogyWise is part of FamilyLink which if you keep tracing back
through links, is basically Paul Allen and his staff who also run
WorldVitalRecords and a lot more. Many of the members post all or part
of their own blogs on the GenealogyWise blog posts. Lately, the blog
posts coming through Google Reader have been hijacked by spam drug
sellers. My Google Reader currently has six posts which appear to be
from "Everyone's Blog Posts - Genealogy Wise" but are offers to buy
drugs online. The poster in one case is identified as "belkennett3985."
Clicking on show original item takes you to the GenealogyWise main page.
A Google search on the poster shows that the profile on Genealogy Wise
dated from one hour before.

What is happening is that spammers are using GenealogyWise to hijack the blog posting network and use the
readers to send out spam to users to of the blog posts. When you follow
the links back to GenealogyWise the profile cannot be found, because it
is being changed by the spammer to use another profile.

If this continues, I may have to disconnect from reading GenealogyWise just to
take control of my Reader account again.

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Comment by Heather Wilkinson Rojo on April 8, 2010 at 11:06am: James, I reported this spam this morning and I received this note from Gena Philibert Ortega
I received your Report an Issue about the recent spam on the blogs. Because anyone can join GenealogyWise, we do get spammers. We do terminate their membership as soon as we see them and delete their blog postings. Please note the following posting I made today in answer to the spamming we have been receiving on the blogs: (link didn't work)
Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.
Gena Philibert Ortega, Community Manager
GenealogyWise"

Comment by Gena Philibert Ortega on April 8, 2010 at 10:29am: James-

Sorry for the duplication, but here is what we are doing to stop the blog post spam.

Because GenealogyWise is a social network that encourages member participation we do have occasional problems with people who join GenealogyWise for the sole purpose to spam members.

Please know that as soon as we see this activity we terminate the membership of the spammer immediately. Keeping spammers of off GenealogyWise is important to me and I take it very seriously.

Because of the recent use of the Blog posts as a means to spam the membership we are going to start, as of today, putting a delay on blog posts so that they must be approved by us before they are posted. This will allow us to delete spamming blog posts before the can be posted to the homepage.

For those who use the blog feature on GenealogyWise the only change you will notice is that you will not see your posting appear instantly after you push the "Publish Post" button. There will be a delay until we get the message about the post and can approve it.

I'm sorry for any inconvenience to our regular genealogy bloggers who provide great information to our community. We are hoping that this will help curtail the incidences of spamming on the site.

Thank you for your help with this. If you have questions you are more than welcome to email me at gortega@familylink.com or message me on my GenealogyWise page.

Gena Philibert Ortega, Community Manager
GenealogyWise

Spam blog posts take over GenealogyWise

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