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Over the last few months, I’ve been battling spam on a forum I own. Tried everything from captcha, require new users to validate their emails and I still got loads of spam.

I headed over to vBulletin.org to find a good plugin and found this. It uses your Akismet API key to filter certain usergroups posts. Akismet has worked really well on this (Akismet has caught 23,837 spam for me since I first installed it.) and a few other blogs that I own so i thought i’d check it out.

Hopefully this will be the end of spam

On many sites there will be a “Digg This” button which will send you to digg where you fill out a title and description. Technewsworld is one of them, but instead of having to fill out all the details it is already done for you. Here is the code;

Digg It

The script is self explanitary, just edit the way you want. By using this script, it may make users more likely to submit your site if they know they don’t have to fill out a description and title etc.

The user who noticed this on digg said;

pressing the “Digg It” link in the site made everything ridiculously easy… the title, description, and even the topic was already filled in. Somebody really wants the traffic generated from Digg.

Saw a good post today on digg which lists 5 reasons you were probably banned from adsense.

All of them involve clicking your own ads which is no suprise.

Some of the comments list extra reasons such as modifing the code and using a similar ad network on the same page.

A californian court has ruled that web publishers and internet providers aren’t responsible for defamatory comments written by others. The court ruled that people claiming they were defamed online could now only seek damages from the original author of the comments – and not the website which re-posted it. Good news for bloggers and forum owners…
Full Story at BBC News

Just saw on Shoemoney that if you sign up to Yahoo Search Marketing , you get a $50 credit. You may want to get your hands on that deal incase they pull it.

Google have also done them in the past but they are quite rare to find now, the last one I saw was in .Net magazine last year. Speaking of Google, I assume you have heard about Google buying YouTube for $1.65bn in shares. YouTube is a very popular site and I’m sure they will find someway to make some money from it. They’ve already said that they want to allow directors to make money from uploading videos. We’ll see where this goes…

It looks like YPN are trying to crack down on Made-For-Adsense (Or Yahoo) sites. On all of the sites I have seen running YPN, the ads are all intrusive

Don’t duplicate (*cough* STEAL *cough*) content from other sites. We want to be with someone original.

Agreed. You should write your own content or pay someone to do it for you.

Don’t place images next to ads. It’s dishonest and we want to be in a long term relationship with publishers everyone can trust. People will think those images have to do with the ads, and when they find that the site they’ve been directed to has nothing to do with them, they’ll be pretty miffed.

Bit of a suprise, they are the first ad company to tell its users not to put images near their ads. Google Adsense did tell its users to make sure a clear divider was between images and the ads. Most of the ads I have seen on YPN with images have been related but I can see their point.

Don’t go nuts with the ads and place them all over every page like they’re your content or something. It looks like you are trying too hard.

Finally cracking down on this, I hate sites that blend in the ads to make it look like their part of the content. A site that does this particularly well is tutorialized.com (check out their tutorials to see what I mean). Not only does it look like
you’re trying too hard but it tricks users.

Don’t send us traffic from Zimbabwe or Ireland. Not that there’s anything wrong with Zimbawe or Ireland, but right now we’re just not ready to make that big, international commitment. We’re working on it, though, so be patient, and good things will come.

Good luck trying to stop that. Geo-targetting databases can cost alot and the free ones can be hard to come across.

You can read the rest of them over at the YPN Blog.

Imagine being able to see your user’s mouse movements, where they click and much more. Think of all the data you could collect and use to optimize your advertisements. Soon you will be able to do this thanks to a new service that uses AJAX to monitor user’s activities. The service called ClickTale is currently in private beta however you can sign up for updates on the site. Here is how the describe it;

ClickTale shows you the full story: every mouse movement, every click and every scrolling action. By using ClickTale you will gain insights that will improve your website’s usability, enhance navigation, and increase effectiveness.

Certainly it is a product you should keep a close eye on, this could dramatically improve CTRs of hundreds of sites. Instead of using eye tracking studies you get your own study customized to your site. Unfortunatly it sounds like they plan to charge for this service, however if it has enough features it may be well worth it.