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Digg Lets Banned Domains Back In

pronetadvertising.com — Digg has repealed their bans on several domains that had been previously banned.

Who dugg this? Made popular Feb 23, 2007

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  • msaleem, on 10/12/2007, -6/+75First of all Digg needs to have a list of banned domains along with the reason why they were banned. Once that has been instituted, they should have an appeals program where domain owners can appeal to have the ban revoked based on conditions set by Digg.
  • webtickle, on 10/12/2007, -1/+42Here are the list of domains according to that blog..

    * Online Marketing Blog
    * DigitalPoint Forums
    * John Chow
    * Squidoo by Seth Godin
    * Text Link Ads
    * SEO News Blog
    * Ecademy
    * Connected Internet
    * Real Estate Webmasters
    * Rock My Monkey
    * Paul Stamatiou
    * Paula Mooney
    * Alan Lewis
    * v7n Forums
    * Luca Filigheddu
    * Find in Forums
    * Encyclopedia Dramatica
    * Oliver Stone
    * Kineda
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21Then after that what else are we to ban because YOU disagree with it? Why not ban some other stuff I disagree with? Then Digg will be a nice homoginized site that only ever links to CNet. Fantastic.

    I'd rather live in a world where anything can be on Digg, and I can decide at any time if the merits of the content warrant digging. Even if a site has been crappy in the past does not mean that every now and then, something of value might be produced.

    I don't want a group with ANY particular set of beliefs to be able to hijack Digg and make sure only "correct" articles are able to be viewed by the larger majority. In order for Digg to stay healthy, it needs to stay diverse.
  • KnightMareInc, on 10/12/2007, -3/+19problem with diggs banned system is all it takes is a small number of people to get together and report it as spam than its banned.
  • Dested, on 10/12/2007, -3/+17Dude dont post that website here, its full of trolls and fanboys. I dont even think anyone goes there anymore.
  • pmcall221, on 10/12/2007, -3/+16I still can't digg digg! When will they lift that ban?
  • str3ama, on 10/12/2007, -3/+15I agree with msaleem, more transparency is what we need. The digg community is in support of Net Neutrality, so while we're all for not censoring content - why not tell us why they're banned and let webmasters appeal the ban.
  • GabrielS, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13As a community driven site, Digg needs to acknowledge which users are burying a story. Right now, it's like anonymous holds on legislation. You can't debate it, you can't vote on it, it's just held, anonymous, and the only thing you can do is call every Digg user to and ask them if they buried the story.

    I'd like to see Digg have a feature where users can see who is burying the Digg and for what reason.
  • curtissthompson, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Cybernet News is also unblocked to some extent. Their http://www.cybernetnews.com/ domain has been unblocked after being banned because it was a work around for submitting content from the http://tech.cybernetnews.com/ domain..which was discovered when a user submitted this:
    http://cybernetnews.com/2006/12/22/allofmp3com-sued-for-165-trillion

    The subdomain name http://tech.cybernetnews.com/ is still banned for almost 200 more days though.

    Just thought I'd add to the list of domains that were unblocked.
  • spiderland, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Personally, I feel that any site with a 99% paraphrase/click-through (in other words, blog/site spam) ratio should be banned. Alternatively, Digg should update its submission algorithm to comb through a potential submission for a source link and warn the submitter of that. Please keep Digg pure, folks.
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13I don't understand why any site ever should be banned from Digg. There simply is no need for it on a social networking site. Instead, Digg needs to figure out ways to damper spam in digging (non-real user diggs) but ALSO spam in burying (as when a group of people with an agenda flood a story spam markings).

    If users do not like stores from a domain, they should be able to report it as spam and then never see it again. But let other people see and decide for themselves, instead of dropping some very good sites just because some people have grudges. Do not let Digg become an overly clique view of the web that censors things some people are uncomfortable with.
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Why do you care if someone is making money if in fact the article content is of interest to people who are digging it? Let people mark what is interesting if they like it!!

  • gharding, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Some IPs got unbanned from logging in, too.. like mine!
  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Digg needs an online discussion forum so we can keep perpetual threads so the community can discuss things like this with the site owners.
  • mvprj84, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13@curtissthompson
    It would definitely be nice to see our domain (tech.cybernetnews.com) get unbanned. At least Digg has recognized that a lot of other sites should be unbanned.
  • rabiddogma, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9There goes the neighborhood.

  • inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11At least Digg has gotten away from the, "We're totally democratic and user moderated" *****. With their banning/unbanning sites, and promoting a few choice stories on their own, I'm glad to see they've finally come clean and admitted that Digg isn't a pure democracy and user-generated content site.

    Naturally, Digg this comment down if you're a Digg sheep who has sipped the kool-aid. Digg is a perfect democracy. Anything that says otherwise is clearly wrong, right?
  • masonreloaded, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5It's simple, you add an "alternative sources" ability where people can add alternate sources for the same story, if enough diggs get given to the alternative/"real" URL then it gets promoted and the digg headline now redirects to that site (with maybe a small piece of text underneath giving the original URL).

    This would also help when a site gets digg-effected as alternate URLS can be "Voted in" and redirect people to a working page rather than the dead site.

    EDIT: @superkendall beat me to it, but the more I think about it, this is an absolute genius idea - KevinRose are you listening?
  • HaltingPoint, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6gabriels -
    That is EXACTLY the kind of abuse that happens with the Digg system. You don't like the content because it isn't your interest so you mark it as spam. Guess what? There's many Digg readers who actually enjoy reading about SEO stuff. I happen to be one of them. I'm an Interactive Strategist (not an SEO person) and this stuff is very relevant to my industry. The fact that they get many diggs and make the front page is testimonial to the fact that many Digg users also enjoy it.

    Who gives a flying ***** if they have ads on the site? Do you realize that 99.9% of the "mainstream" sites that people love to see pop up on Digg are also ad supported? Lets take Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Consumerist, or any of the Federated Media blogs...guess what, they're ALL ad-supported!!! Get off your ***** high horse and stop being such a damn hypocrite. I wish there was a way to ban Digg users who abused the Bury function to bury stories they don't like or stories from people who post the content on blogs. Free blog hosting makes it possible for a lot of unique content to be put online for free, and shouldn't be buried just because it might be on a generic Blogger template or have a couple AdSense units. Jesus, AdSense doesn't even make people money from Diggers.
  • Mr.Scientist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Lovely. And the news is brought to you by ProNetAdvertising. WTF is going on here? Is Digg officially a search engine optimizer hideout?
  • Yorn, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9I report as spam anything with SEO in the title. For good reason, they are spammers. Their entire intent with digg is to get linked and be viewed. The majority of their revenue is via ads. It just seems to me that if we're all pissed off and upset about ads and advertisements on the Internet, then why would we want to hear stories from individuals in the advertising industry?

    Why would I want to read blogs about blogs? Why would I want to read a blog about increasing my website traffic and generating more ad-sense revenue? I don't make money on the Internet, I use it for entertainment, and none of the things the above "unbanned" websites seem to be about is the least bit interesting to me.

    If anything, I'd be willing to move to a site where someone took Digg and went even more strict with the submissions, anyone up for feeding RSS of Digg into a very strict algorithm to get rid of SEO and spammers?
  • digitalpoint, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Hmmmm... anyway to get digitalpoint.com rebanned?
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Even blog-site spam I don't feel comfortable banning, but I do think there should be some way to submit the concept of a site really referring to some other URL - and if enough people decide that is the "true" URL, and if that URL exists in the linked to site, then it becomes the URL the submission really links to (along with some recognition the URL had been altered and a link back to the original, just in case).

    There are a lot of creative ways to never ban sites yet still keep submissions healthy through community policing. Banning is a cop-out.
  • RonaldLewis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Why not explain why many digg users claim legitimate and original blog material as "blog spam?" Is it simply because they have ads as well? That makes zero sense.
  • grendelboogie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@dreadsword,

    Hey, I'm Digg's Director of Ops. I'm sorry if you sent an email to us and we haven't got back to you. Can you send the info again to feedback@digg.com and I'll ask them to forward it to me to investigate? Post back in here once you've sent the email.
  • grendelboogie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@ dreadsword

    NP. We're looking into it now.
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3How about creating a transparent "BANNED" index based on how many times stories from a URL have been buried?

    I.e.: There's a threshold number based on Digg's accumulated metrics; if enough stories from a URL get buried as spam, it automatically gets banned for say 6 weeks or something.

    That would...
    (a) take load off moderators
    (b) clean up the "upcoming" areas
    (c) be transparent and understandable to users and remove the "favoritism" factor that people freak out about

    The data to implement this is there. We know its being collected. That "buried as spam" metric just needs to trigger an action, and the ban list needs to be displayed somewhere.

    This would give new relevance to the "digg down" action too.
  • aweblogs, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3John Chow/Kineda/V7n/DigitalPoint all great sites, glad to see them unbanned.
  • n00tz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4It'd be nice if there was an explanation as to why these were banned, I know Paul Stamatiou from classes I had with him in college. His articles are genuine, so I don't think they could have qualified as spam in any form I've seen before.

    An appeals system would definitely be a positive move on the part of digg if they don't already have one.
  • richstyles, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Some confirmed sightings:

    http://www.digg.com/tech_news/My_Top_5_Tech_Mistakes

    http://www.digg.com/design/10_Blogging_Mistakes_To_Avoid_2

    I wonder how many of these sites are going to dominate the front page now that the flood gates are opened???
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4And what is wrong with the sites dominating and reaching the front page if users truly find them interesting? Just because YOU do not like them does not mean other digg readers agree with you!

    There are plenty of stories that make the front page, that I have no interest in whatsoever. I simply skip them and move on.
  • GabrielS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@haltingpoint

    I'm guessing your comment was not directed to me. All I was saying is that I think it would be valuable if Digg users could see a log of which users voted to bury a story, and what reason they cited. This would identify users that merely bury stories that they don't like or they wish to hide from everyone else.

    The current process is essentially a secret ballot.
  • MatthewTheRaven, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Lumenlab.com also appears to have been un-banned. They have a DIY LCD projector forum and store, as well as a cheap commercial projector. The night the commercial projector was released, I tried to submit it and found out that they were banned.

    I like the idea for a list of banned sites being made available along with the reasons for the banning. Site owners should be allowed to make a request to be unbanned and legitimate bans should help shame the sites into cleaning up their act.
  • grendelboogie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@dreadsword

    Sent you email with some questions.
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Email sent:

    Hello - I run a mashup at SLANTT.net. Slantt takes an RSS feed, and uses del.icio.us tags and the Technorati API to wrap related material around that story. In a nutshell, its a blog and link discovery service.

    For example, here's the SLANTTed TechCrunch page:
    http://slantt.net/source/techcrunch

    I originally based SLANTT on the Digg (Frontpage All Topics) RSS feed - people bookmark the hell out of those pages, which makes for good del.icio.us tags to work off of.

    The problem is that people don't bookmark the Digg pages - they bookmark the story URL that the Digg entry points too. Unfortunately, that URL isn't surfaced by Digg in RSS or an API (that I'm aware of). What that leaves me with is scraping the Digg pages for that URL - which is what I did.

    And all went fine - for a few days. Then, Digg stopped talking to my server - I haven't been able to get an HTTP response since (that was maybe a week ago?). I assume that Digg is block IP's which it considers to be abusive, which makes sense.

    So - it would be great if SLANTT could be reinstated. Here are the two pertinent things:

    1. Request Load:

    SLANTT checks the RSS feeds that it indexes hourly - so thats 24 RSS page requests in a day.
    SLANTT will scrape the corresponding Digg page for each story posted to the Frontpage RSS feed *once.* Any story only gets scraped *once* - so that's 200-300 more HTTP requests in a 24 hour period, split out hourly depending on Digg Frontpage delta.
    That volume may have spiked in my initial build and testing phase which could have set off alarm bells on your end - but that's past. I've implemented some load splitting algorithims that even out traffic from SLANTT to the sites I'm hitting:
    http://slantt.net/log.php

    2. Content Use:

    I'm very careful to make clear the source of the content that is Slantted, and clearly link back to the Digg page for the story, and the story submitter. If there's anything else attributional that you'd like to see, let me know.

    That's it in a nutshell. Your thoughts would be appreciated, and if I'm wrong about what's happend here (i.e.: if my IP hasn't been banned) - I apologize!
  • dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3There's really no valid reason to ever submit a page on Digg, is there..?
    - Ben
  • HaltingPoint, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Speak for yourself, I actually find the SEO stuff interesting and apparently so do many other Diggers since the stories keep popping up on the front page.
  • RonaldLewis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2How about everyone just stop worrying about which sites should or shouldn't be banned, and enjoy digg for what it is.
  • toprank, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3An arbitrary spam policing situation isn't good for anyone. Besides, it's not scalable. Maybe next steps are what msaleem suggests above.
  • qeek, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Glad to see Paul Stamatiou back.
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Ok - that is the right IP, so that's all good.

    User-Agent wasn't being sent in the HTTP headers at all, which may have been the problem. I've set it to be... "SLANTT.net Indexing Service v0.2"

    I'll try and re-index digg now with a valid User-Agent and see if that works.
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2BTW - yes, I am an idiot, before anyone asks. I hadn't contacted Digg prior to posting in this thread, so I didn't really have any business making the snippy "no such support from Digg" comment. Its just the end of a long week, and I'm feeling snippy general. Apologies.
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Email received - chasing down some info, will post back.
  • itamer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hi dreadsword

    I know that alot of people emailed Digg after the mass user ban last year. I'm sure many were written in anger but others were reasonable requests for information. I don't believe any heard back. It's all water under the bridge now so don't go trawling back through the archives - however when people get banned it might help give them a ban code and then when they try to login say "Your account has been blocked. Reason: " and have give a verbose description of the ban code.
  • superkendall, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3In fact I just went and dugg both stories as a celebration of freedom from censorship and oppression. Viva la difference!
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@itamer - I have no idea what you're talking about. I've never been banned, nor am I going through any archives for anything. I had some technical issues with a page indexer I wrote, which the Digg crew helped me through. I have no clue what your comment is about.
  • dreadsword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Bingo - we have a winner! Its now indexing again.

    Thank-you for all of your help!

    Here it is, btw... http://slantt.net/source/digg_all
  • dbr_onix, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"First of all Digg needs to have a list of banned domains along with the reason why they were banned"
    It's a nice idea, but it wouldn't work - If spammers can see the exact reason a domain was banned, they'll just work out a way of spamming without doing anything on the list.
    It's not perfect, but the current "random" banning seems to work - Just like email anti-spam, of course there are false-positives - a perfect anti-spamming system is damn-near impossible to create..
    A system for domain-owners to appeal bans, and have them approved/denied by a human (Or a vote? Which again is open to abuse by people with multiple Digg accounts..).
    Example : You click on a "appeal ban on www.blah.com" link. It asks you to create a hidden DIV or comment on the domain which was banned (to prove you own the domain/hosting), you add to the page), then rechecks the site - If it finds the correct ID, you are either given the reason for the ban, and an "excuse" field (or just the "excuse field", with no reason). Then someone checks the reason, and the site, and decides whether to unban it or not..
    - Ben
  • unitedstatians, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1@pmcall221
    http://digg.bokefu.com/
  • politech, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@modizzle, that makes YOU part of the problem. You and those like you are the ones "gaming" the Digg system.

    Do you accuse engadget of gaming digg? gizmodo? how about arstechnica?
    Ok not fair, those are tech blogs ... how about thesmokinggun.com or treehugger.com or rawstory.com?

    The point is that as long as blog posts are posted in the appropriate Digg category, you get to see news that you may not otherwise see. Agree or disagree with the substance all you want, but enough with the meager attempts at censorship.

    If you have nothing of substance to add to the discussion just lurk.
    If you don't like a category, filter it.

    Some blogs have a huge following, and can generate enough traffic on of their own to "become popular" on Digg. (hint: LGF). The Digg links on blogs are actively supported and promoted by K Rose himself. So no ... LGF and similar blogs are not gaming Digg. They are accepting an open invitation from Kevin Rose to participate in democratic discussion.

    Deal with it. Stop burying valid postings.
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