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Netvouz - Online Social Bookmark Manager - Save, Tag and Share your bookmarks

This is the Netvouz blog. To visit the Netvouz social bookmarking service go to www.netvouz.com.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Spam cleanup!

The Netvouz bookmark database grows steadily - and we like it! Lots of good stuff is coming in all the time.

However to maintain Netvouz' excellent performance and to keep our service free from junk we have decided to do a major spam cleanup. We believe we will junk more than 100000 accounts in this process so it's gonna take us a while.

While we do this we have also disabled the self-registration feature, so during the time we will manually create new accounts for those who really want them.

Happy bookmarking!

//Henrik

36 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know all my messages are all private. it is any reason to be worried that i cannot use my account for a specific period of time? I hope i will not loose my pages, it will that happen?(I am netvouz member)

Henrik said...

Don't worry, no non-spammer accounts will be touched. Netvouz will continue to work just as usual, and you can still save bookmarks just as usual. We have *only* disabled the possibility create new user accounts while we clean up the junk.

//Henrik

Anonymous said...

Hi Henrik

It seams that "www.adomain.com" and "www.adomain.com/" not are seen like the same link. I think I might have some double links because of this. You might want to check you compare script when adding new links if the last char is / if it only is a domainname.

// Viktor (vbdata)

Henrik said...

Hello Viktor,

Yes, they are currently seen as two different URLs. Same goes for domain.com (without www). Will need to fix that in a future release.

//Henrik

Anonymous said...

Hello there...
I wanna try this bookmark organizer stuff...
But still can't register.
When should I look back?

Best Regards
ViZion

bmaindia said...

Nice Blog Thats all!!!!

Cannedguds said...

I hope you can get netvouz back again as soon as you can. I would really like to register!

Anonymous said...

I have been offline for a while and tried to sign in today, got a user not found message? User name is heidinova, im not a spammer and have now lost my account and bookmarks :(

Henrik said...

Dear heidinova...

As I told you via email you have been junked. And looking at your bookmarks on del.icio.us it seems we did the right thing. That's self-promotion.

You also said your email account had been deleted. Netvouz has nothing to do with that, but perhaps your email provider also thinks you're a spammer.

Give it up.

//Henrik

Holger said...

The best way against Spammer ist TO CLOSE THIS SILLY SERVICE :-) For sure noone would miss you...maybe some spammer...but hey you wanna fight spammmer...so why dont close this silly site?

Anonymous said...

Is self registration going to be permanently closed as it seems to have been closed for quite a long time.

Is there anyway that self registration can be opened whilst simultaneously weeding out the accounts that you wish to close? I really appreciate and value the self registration because it affords a certain extra level of privacy.

Many thanks for providing such a nice service.

Jack

Anonymous said...

How do the other main social bookmarking sites clean their accounts? I presume they must do this on a continual basis.

Anonymous said...

Hello Henrik,
Can you please re-enable self account creation as this isone of the largest and most valued aspects of your appreciated service, namely that of privacy.

Thankyou

Henrik said...

Hello,

As there are a number of comments on this blog I now take the opportunity to respond to them all in this single post.

Everyone
We are working to keep Netvouz one of the best places around to keep your bookmarks online. This means we need to provide a continuously available service with good response times, free from spam and junk, and with new useful features - everything free of charge, of course. I'm working hard on delivering a good compromise between these requirements. Recently I took the decision to block new registrations to be able to focus on cleaning up some junk. This work is not yet finished.

If someone (no spammers please...) really badly want an account then please contact us and we'll manually sign you up.

Holger
If you really think we should close, I suggest you simply just leave and you should no longer be bothered.

anonymous
During the past years we have continuously been doing housekeeping, so this is not something we have just begun with.
If you want an account, please drop us an email and we'll fix it for you.

//Henrik

Unknown said...

Very good, i am looking for register on netvouz, when you will enable new registration?

Henrik said...

Sushil,

Drop us an email and we'll create an account for you. No problems.

//Henrik

Anonymous said...

December is coming and signup is still closed. Looking at the homepage of Netvouz 1/3 of links are spam.

Henrik, are you consdiering to close Netvouz? can we do anything to help you?

Henrik said...

Hello,

I've decided to keep the self-signup closed a little bit more to reduce the amount of new junk accounts being created. We do accept new accounts and create them manually for those who ask for them.

//Henrik

Anonymous said...

yah..same with with ViZion..i like to try this bookmarks but still i can't register..

Unknown said...

It's been 6 months already. When will this be available for us regular people to use this service to actually save our bookmarks on a reliable platform?

Henrik said...

Hello,

As you can see from posts above, just drop us an email and we'll manually create an account for you.

//Henrik

Anonymous said...

Massive WEB 2.0 project never be free of spam. You are fighting with windmills.

Henrik said...

Of course a public and free service will never be completely free from spam. But we're trying to minimize the jun, and we're doing pretty good. This consumes a lot of time, but it's something we need to do to maintain the high quality of our service to our valid users.

//Henrik

Rev. Fr. Jessie Somosierra said...

I hope you will finish your housekeeping soon. I would like to register

www.clickmycoupon.com said...

So, to be clear, if a website located at http://www.clickmycoupon.com/discount-coupons/Murfreesboro/Tennessee , which is free for all businesses to post coupons, no matter where they are located in the U.S. Is that considered spam?

Henrik said...

Craib

One such link - no, hundreds - yes.

And we do accept new members, just drop us an email and we'll create accounts for you.

//Henrik

gaus surahman said...

I have lots of spam attacks on my own site, too. My own way to deal with this without sacrificing my bandwidth is to remove the regular contact form. This form attracts thousand of robot spammers each month. With limited bandwith, this is too much. I don't rely simply on mollom or akismet services, as I worry that their fights against spammers may influence my bandwidth in the long run.

And then totaly leave my comment form to third party service, such as disqus. They have good service to filter spams. Your way to blogger is a good choice, too.

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should write an updated blog post about this issue, so new users see that this site is still alive.

Bart said...

The silence over here is deafening. Any chance of Netvouz opening up again in the near future? By now you've had the chance to delete every entry in the database manually one by one. I hope this long silence is no sign of (near) death... It would be a petty, I've always enjoyed Netvouz very much, but no one I recommend it can sign up in a normal manner, which is a petty.

Henrik said...

Hello Bart,

We're definitely alive (and our silence is because we're developing new Web 2.0 features for Netvouz).

But we have also decided not to allow any self-registration for the time being. 99% of all users are here only to spam and it's too much of a burden to clean them all up. We prefer to focus our resources on keeping Netvouz alive and healthy. And for those *real* users (like your friends??) who want to sign up we do create accounts manually.

//Henrik

Bart said...

Henrik, thanks for your reply and update, I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to the web 2.0 developments.
I've shown my friends this blog and they know they can request for an account, but that's the problem. They don't trust it and think Netvouz will be gone soon anyway and they think account requests are not very web 2.0.
But I'll be keeping an eye and will tell them about improvements.

Thanks again,
Bart

Miriam said...

hey Henrik,
do you have an idea when signing up at netvouz will be possible again?
I would like to open an account.

Henrik said...

Hello Miriam,

At this moment we don't have any schedule for when to reopen the self-registration. We have enabled it a little now and then to "probe" the new registrations, but unfortunately a ridiculously high percentage are spammers. So we really see no reason why we should waste our time with them.

If you want an account drop us an email. We create accounts once a week and process the requests that have arrived since our last batch. Give or take some here or there.

//Henrik

askarnett said...

Where is the email address to apply for an account?

Henrik said...

It's on the Contacts page at http://www.netvouz.com/info/contact

//Henrik

csaba said...

How can I get information when the registration is enabled again ?