I recently had the giddy honor of speaking at the 2010 Web2.0Expo in San Francisco. The topic was simple – spam. I shared some insights (or I hope they were insights, anyway) about combating the spam problem on a social website – something I had been doing quite a lot of since joining Flickr. The slides are now on Slideshare and embedded below.
Thanks to Brady and the rest of the w2e team for putting together a great conference. I didn’t get to go to as many sessions as I would have liked due to having to spend most of my time in the speakers lounge preparing, but the ones I did go to were excellent.
Things I forgot to say in the talk/slides that are important:
Keep track of recent rates for ALL activity that your users do. This gets a bit expensive in terms of storage, but if you prune the data furiously, it can be made sustainable. Having that information is key – it can be used at pretty much every step of spam mitigation. Also, be smart about this – if messages can be deleted from a table, don’t use that table to do the counting. Nobody I know has EVER done that……
Rate limit everything. There’s usually a sweetspot right between what 99% of real users will actually ever do and spam-land.
Anyway, here are the slides. Enjoy!