» With Success Comes Trouble

Administrators of busy websites already know this, but the bigger and more successful you get–the more trouble you attract. A great example would be digg.com. When a website has as much traffic as digg.com, users will find a way to take advantage of that. For digg, this means trying to get onto the homepage through various illegitimate means. Recently, digg.com’s founder Kevin Rose posted on his blog that measures are being taken to ensure users cannot manipulate the integrity of digg.com. One of these measures was to remove the “top diggers” list which showcased the members that brought the most articles to the homepage. These top diggers were allegedly accepting cash payments to help bring stories to the front page. The latest development is that Christopher Fink, who works for Digg competitor, Netscape has posted the list of top diggers here based on publicly available information (digg.com user profiles).

Malicious activity of this sort is not limited to websites like digg.com. I have seen similar activity on blogs such as John’s in which users compete to be the top commentator. Readers of John’s blog openly compete to post as many comments as possible because he lists the top commentators on the sidebar of his blog. This in turn provides a very valuable link to an upstart blog. Currently it is only a handful of users doing this, but if this number rises, it could become quite a hassle to sift through the meaningful comments.

Another victim of its success is wikipedia. A link from wikipedia to a website provides a valuable link from a reputable website. Wikipedia also recently took measures in an attempt to stop ~~spammers~~ search engine optimizers from adding links to their own websites. Wikipedia has now added the “rel=nofollow” tag to all outbound links.

As sites grow and as users get more creative in discovering ways to take advantage of the success of others, website operators are fighting back with fixes and counter measures. Sometimes, it is beneficial to let people build off the success of your website. It is important however, to monitor this and ensure it does not affect the integrity of your website. You don’t want to lose all your loyal visitors because a few bad apples ruin the experience for everyone else.

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