With a plethora of online sites coming up, we are concerned with finding the relevant ones. And then with so much cut-throat competition, the online sites themselves do not have a check-in or security mechanism in place.
Only today my colleague found a loophole in one of the very popular sites for MBA preparation – pagalguy.com. Pagalguy’s administrators or moderators manual block the users who post irrelevant details on their forum. But then if a user keeps on messaging other members of its site, say 1 message per day to 300 different users, there is no safeguard. So why is it that this big brand never found this issue before? The question that arises is whether there was a certain limitation on its end, say, a lack of thinking in that direction. Or the other instance being this bug getting lost in the meshed spider web of implementing any modification. Probably, the website has been outsourced for development, probably the locus of control lies only at the topmost level, probably any idea of change requires delving deep into many levels of hierarchies of approval that it did not even register. Too many probabilities. However, should not there be a solution to discourage companies from digressing their loyal users from what’s intended? Spam, yes, that’s what it is for these loyal users. These users never wanted unsolicited advice from any coaching institute or any advertising agency to propagate their products or ideas!
Taking a case of another big-wig in the internet domain - Yahoo. A person can create as many yahoo email accounts as he wants, that too within a few minutes from the same IP address. This is where the Google leads. With Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer being so focused on improving the packaged product of yahoo technologically, we are curious to find out if this particular issue is going to be tackled, for otherwise genuine users will keep on creating infinitesimally fake accounts and block the internet space through voluminous spam everywhere. So, is this actually relevant? Yes, because email id is a pre-requisite of posting on different websites, and with these new fake email ids, a spiral of creating even more new accounts on other websites emanates.
So, what is the solution of saving internet data space? What is going to be the process of segregating valid information? These are a few pertinent questions that a website needs to tackle and answer in the present scenario of Web 2.0.
Comments (2 so far )
Of course, for yahoo and google, it would not matter, but then they need to keep in check if those numbers increase humongously in the coming years because there may already be a lot of dead accounts (which were used only for a few days, and then forgotten entirely by the owner).
Now, about segregating valid information, I was not referring with respect to company, but with the perspective of users. A user who logs into the system when so much spamming is occurring may get confused about the validity and relevancy of that particular *spammed* information.
By the way, from just today, Pagalguy has changed its policy of creation of new accounts. From now on, creating new usernames is not so easy. A person can create an username, however he/she has to contact their helpdesk for its activation. And this may take 24hours. So, is that still a solution? But ya, of course, things are on their way to just be in place!
internet data space:
is huge, atleast for yahoo and google, its so huge that a manual process of creating fake accounts cannot bother them.
segregating valid information:
the activity associated with any account is meticulously logged and processed usually to cater to the need of personalised content distribution. Hence any account that shows an erratic behavior is flagged. There is so much detailed data of your activity with every website that they can figure out fake accounts any day(usually).
as far as getting spam email is concerned, that totally depends on the policies of websites where you provide your email address and the amount of thought they have given to each security use case.
missing out one or two use cases is very natural, it gets fixed only after users point out the bug. And generally websites respond fast to such feedback because of the competition.
P:S: I am not trying to answer any questions here ... just my personal opinion.