A couple days ago, I saw a couple FriendFeed messages linking to FriendFeed accounts that spam. To me, this was quite alarming. I love FriendFeed partly due to it’s excellent community, and the idea of another good community being destroyed by spammers wasn’t one that I wanted to think about.

Of course, not thinking about the problem is a pretty bad way of solving it. I just read Mike Fruchter’s post titled “Spam invades Friendfeed“, and it brought to my attention an idea that Robert Scoble had about controlling spam on FriendFeed. Scoble’s idea is to put a FriendFeed account into a jail if there are a certain number more blocks than subscriptions.

Of course, Robert Scoble’s idea, although interesting, can be improved upon. What if spammers create an enormous amount of accounts to all subscribe to each other in an attempt to balance the increasing number of the spammer accounts that were blocked?

The first thing to reduce this as a possibility is to ensure that blocks increase faster than subscriptions. Assuming that FriendFeed doesn’t already do this, the number of accounts created per IP per hour should be limited to a number that won’t be too much of a hassle for computers sharing an IP, but should slow down individual bots. Of course, various techniques could be used by spammers to get around the IP limit, but at least it would make the job more difficult for spammers and might encourage at least a few to go other places where spamming is easier.

Second, instead of seeing if there are a significant number more blocks than subscriptions, I would use a separate flag specifically reserved for spammers. On the user interface, this might look like, “Report this user as a spammer,” or some other phrase. The reason for a separate, spammer-only flag is that the normal blocking feature is currently used to generally hide all activity of certain users that others do not want to see. Highly well-known, but very disliked FriendFeed users might accidentally trigger the anti-spam mechanism because of a high number of blocks relative to subscriptions. For easy access as well as keeping the user interface clean, I would add a “Report spam” button to the box that users on FriendFeed see whenever they mouseover a link to a FriendFeed profile. I would change it from what it currently is,

and add the link as shown below.

I would suggest marking users as spammers if a significant number of comments are identical or contain URLs to the same websites, but that is easily defeated by posting slightly different variations of spam messages and using different URL shortening services to mask the URL.

Now, if you’re reading this, you are probably thinking that my ways to improve FriendFeed’s spam handling and reporting capabilities aren’t that good, you’re probably right. The problem with spam is that it’s so difficult to automatically handle. CAPTCHAs can be broken, the spam of one spammer come from multiple places (such as accounts or IPs), and a variety of other techniques can be defeated by spammers.

Since the most accurate way to make sure that spam comments are not displayed is moderation, I’ll briefly explain how you can delete FriendFeed comments on your entries.

So, how would you reduce the spam on FriendFeed?