An Ex-Blog – Comments Are Closed

I maintain a Bebo profile for work. Personally, I’m not a great fan of Bebo, but I can understand why it’s one of the most popular sites in the country, and when your customers are part of the Bebo generation, it’s one of those things that you have to do.

What bugs me though is the fact that over the last few weeks, there’s been a huge increase in the amount of spam being sent on the Bebo network. Being the conscientious Internet user that I am, I of course report any spam received to Bebo.

I report spam because I loath spammers with a depth that is hard to describe. They are the absolute dregs of the Internet community. They prey on the computer illiterate, easily led and the just downright terminally stupid. Spammers create such a nuisance that a lot of time and resources are lost just to dealing with the vast amount of spam generated by these scumbags. In my opinion, anyone convicted of spamming should be left on a desert island, as far away from computer access as possible, and left to fend for themselves. Being the bottom-living scum that they are, it wouldn’t surprise me if even their SOS messages became an effort to hawk dodgy pharmaceuticals, fake watches and penny shares. OK, ok, rant over, back to Bebo’s Spam Policy.

Bebo’s spam policy pisses me off just as much as any spammer would:

What is considered Spam?
Spam is a comment or posting that bears no relationship to the content to which it’s related. For example, if someone uploads a video and all the comment says is ‘Check out ma’ page’ then that is clearly Spam. Multiple postings of the same comment is also Spam.

What happens after I report Spam?
All reports of Spam will be manually reviewed. If the reviewer agrees that it is Spam then the poster will be blocked from further posts for a certain period.

How long are Spammers blocked for?
It all depends how many times they have Spammed. The first time will be just 8 hours. The second time 24 hours. The third time 3 days. The more complaints received the longer the block will be for.

I can understand that a social networking site such as Bebo has to be careful when it comes to dealing with spam – too harsh a policy and anybody with a grudge can report a user for sending spam and innocent users could end up losing their profiles.

But when Bebo say that they manually review each report before taking action, then simply blocking spammers is a cop-out. To me Bebo are saying that they recognise that a spammer is sending possible pornographic spam to young kids, (every piece of spam I’ve received over the last few weeks has been links to porn websites), but all they’ll do is slap them on the wrist and leave the spammer keep their profile. That to me is a spam policy that is bordering on the criminally negligent.

Spam like this should be removed, the sender banned, the originating IP address logged and the senders ISP notified. The ISP should then notify the user and cut their access to the Net. Now some will make the argument that the majority of spam is generated on ordinary user machines which have been unknowingly compromised and are part of a “zombie network”. To that I say, “So? They should still lose their Internet access.”

If your computer has been compromised, and you don’t know about it, then you should be kicked off the Internet until you have resolved the problem. If you’re computer is under the control of another party, then chances are they’ll probably have your credit card number, bank details and more than enough information to steal your identity. Keeping you off the Internet and preventing your computer from passing on your personal information is doing you a favour.

I’d happily sign up with any ISP that promised to do this. Start with the backbone providers and let it trickle down to the major ISP’s and from them to smaller ISP’s, and we’d eventually have a lot less spam on the Internet.