Flickr Comment Spam: Any Solutions?

A great photo by Wolfpix seems to have attracted a lot of obvious Flickr comment spam.

(UPDATE: Turns out the comments I’m complaining here are not comment spam — but man, they sure look like it. See Karoli’s comment below for an explanation.)

I love Flickr and other photo-sharing services. Not that I’m much of a photographer myself, but I love that Flickr makes it easy to designate and find Creative Commons-licensed images. I even have a Flickr CC search plugin on my Firefox search bar, and I use it daily. That’s because I prefer to include an illustrative image with every post. It just makes blogging more fun.

Whenever I use a CC-licensed image, I always comment back thank the owner and let them know I used it as an illustration, and where. I figure it’s the least I can do.

Because I leave lots of comments on Flickr to thank photographers for their CC-licensed images, I’ve been noticing lately though that comment spam seems to be picking up on Flickr. That’s a bummer.

Case in point: This morning I used this great duck picture by Wolpix to illustrate this E-Media Tidbits post by Steve Klein. When I went to leave my comment, I noticed many other comments that appear to be spam — they’re identical, except they’re left by different “users” — as if someone set up fake Flickr accounts for the purpose of leaving spam.

Spam in this environment especially sucks because it cuts off conversation and dilutes relevance.

What could Flickr do – or are they doing something I’m missing — to either prevent comment spam or discourage it by making it harder?

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on January 28, 2008 at 7:42 am and filed under conversational media, photos, problems, services, social media. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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5 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

Thanks. That’s the one I settled on myself. Initially I was a bit cautious of the vast selection of plug-ins available. Like my cats, I was suspicious and felt the need to wap them first.

[Reply]

1. Mack on January 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
Mack: The firefox search plugin I use is Flickr CC-BY full text. You can find it via the link in my post.

[Reply]

2. Amy Gahran on January 28th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Ah, Thanks Karoli. I didn’t understand how that worked. But man, those group invites sure do look like spam! Ugh. There’s got to be a better way to handle that side of the process.

- Amy Gahran

[Reply]

3. Amy Gahran on January 28th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Amy, that’s not really comment spam. Some groups invite images in, and then the members comment by posting preset code (usually created by the group admin) to award it with a comment and a “vote”.

The more ‘votes’ an image gets, the more likely it is to wind up on the “interestingness 500′, which is the goal of many who participate in the Flickr Community.

I recently posted this photo, which was invited to the same group you mention in your post. As you can see, I didn’t receive the same number of ‘votes’ as the duck did.

Nancy White would call those comments a ‘community indicator’. To me, they’re a lot of work, so I’ve actually considered taking the tack of asking that my images NOT be invited to groups.

(PS — mine are available under the same CC license…feel free to use them)

[Reply]

4. Karoli on January 28th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Hi Amy,
I didn’t know about the FireFox plugin. Thanks. Which of the plugins are you using?

I also hadn’t thought of adding a comment to an image I’m using. Good idea. I had been sending private messages to the owner but I like the idea of letting other viewers know that an image has been used.

[Reply]

5. Mack on January 28th, 2008 at 9:09 am