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Why are there no sites to shame and punish companies that spammers promote?

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app103:
There already is a list to which volunteers have been contributing...bloggers, webmasters, forum moderators, etc.

Web Of Trust (WOT)

They have a browser plugin, too, which shows those ratings next to search results, and a nice warning that pops up on sites that have bad ratings.

More people should use it and contribute info about sites, both good and bad.

I have been marking the domains of those that spam this forum for a long time.

And these ratings do matter to companies, as some have even paid to attempt to have their bad ratings improved. But those that get caught by the dedicated users will have that reflected on the site's ratings page, as well. And companies can't excuse away bad behavior because some users know better than to fall for it and will respond on the company's ratings page to any attempt to do so, and proof of bad behavior will be provided when a company asks users to consider changing their previous ratings.

example 1a, example 1b, example 2, example 3a, example 3b

And for those that wonder how easy it is to manipulate a site's ratings to cover up their spamming activities...

Can a site's reputation be manipulated?

When someone first hears about the concept behind WOT, their first objection is that someone could easily spam the system with tons of ratings and rate down their competitors or otherwise manipulate reputations, but that's not true. In order to keep ratings more reliable, the system tracks each user's rating behavior before deciding how much it trusts the user. WOT applies sophisticated algorithms to detect and eliminate any manipulation of reputation.
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How reliable are the ratings?

Usually in reputation systems each rating is weighted equally and reputations are computed as the average of all ratings, which makes them extremely vulnerable to automated attacks. Therefore, we decided early on to value ratings by their merit and use some of the principles of Bayesian inference for combining the ratings into reputations. The short version is that the system analyzes each user's rating behavior from several aspects in order to determine their reliability. When you start using WOT, your ratings have little weight, but if you keep rating sites consistently, your ratings will be considered more reliable over time. The meritocratic nature of the system makes it far more difficult for spammers to abuse, because bots will have a hard time simulating human behavior over a long period of time.
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barney:
Personally, I hold no ruth for Web of Trust (WOT).  I played there for a while, but left when I could find no means whatsoever for redress.  That came about because a couple of acquaintances, separate instances, were basically kicked off the Web by WOT.  The only thing either of them did wrong was to make the wrong, vindictive enemies.

WOT is based upon the concept that [place your number here] people can't be wrong.  Well, Hitler got elected - and many of those can't be wrong people changed their minds ... but that mass of folk were wrong by today's standards.  The Salem Witchcraft Trials in early US were effective at removing folk, particularly women, from life - sometimes upon a single accusation that was supported by a jealous or vindictive populace [which couldn't, by definition be wrong].

WOT is just an example, as was pre-WWII Germany and Salem, of how a Wall of Shame can be corrupted and re-purposed.  Be cautious in advocating/implementing such, for it is a very, very slippery slope.

Mind,  I hold no ruth for spammers and their customers, either.  But once established, a Wall of Shame is extremely difficult to tear down.  However, it is very easy to corrupt from original intentions.

KRSMAV:
I hesitate to propose illegal responses to illegal spam, but I'm curious whether anyone has tried a DDoS attack on the reply links in spam messages?

TaoPhoenix:
I hesitate to propose illegal responses to illegal spam, but I'm curious whether anyone has tried a DDoS attack on the reply links in spam messages?
-KRSMAV (April 17, 2013, 08:01 AM)
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I disapprove of this, because I look at the reply links as a hobby, and they look more like hacked add'ys than a big entity.

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