Daniel Spisak on Technology

Okay people, listen the fuck up. I’ve had it with you fucking friend spammers and adbots.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the 3-8 emails you get between the hours of 10PM to 5AM almost every night now. They are almost always profiles of “women” who supposedly want to be my friends. If I bother to look at their profiles, 999/1000 times its a profile that was created to promote a stupid porn website or a camwhore site or some stupid site trying to take advantage of MySpace users.

Of course, if a user sends me a message on here that is spam it’s easy for my to click on the “Report as Spam” link in the message section. But when “people” try to add me there is no “Report as Spam” button in the Friend Requests window, just “Approve” “Deny” and “Send Message”.

Yet 90%+ of all “friend” requests I get is from spammers and adbots!

I go look at this “persons” profile and typical see one of a few things:

1. A user profile with nothing listed under About Me or Who I Want to Meet with a single solitary photo of them that is the same size as the thumbnail picture. Typically has only 10-25 friends in their network and no or one comment. Almost nothing listed under Interests or Details.

2. A user profile with all kinds of information listed about their hotmail email address, their AIM handle or MSN handle and a bunch of text making them sound like an easy slut usually followed up by a link to their “private profile” which takes you to a For-Pay Camwhore site. Typically has anywhere from 10-200+ friends with tons of comments from sad sad fucking men who think this is a real woman who wants in their pants.

3. A user profile with almost no information listed and few friends or comments because as soon as you try to load their profile page it hijacks your broswer and forces it to auto-load their lame-ass Camwhore or Crap Ass Porn site that is worth the electrons it took to send it to your computer.

All three of these categories of friends spammer should be stupidly easy to filter and catch preemptively if the developers at MySpace are paying attention to this problem. In the meantime, give us a freaking button to report friend spammers for what they are, spammers!

So MySpace why the hell haven’t you added a “Report Spammer” button to the Friend Requests screen? This would be stupidly easily for you guys to do on your back end and would help you eliminate spammers from the site that much faster. It would also make using your site less annoying and pleasureable. Instead of getting another email notification and seeing it as a spammer the majority of the times I would actual give a crap about activity on this account if it was relatively certain to not be spammers causing it.