Does Anyone Like MyBlogLog’s Community Messaging Tool?

Michael Garrett,

on July 04, 2007,

If you have been using MyBlogLog, then chances are that you know about the recent changes that have been implemented on the service, particularly the new community messaging feature. Apparently, users have been demanding the ability to quickly send one message to all members of a community. At least that is what the team at MyBlogLog (MBL) is saying. I have yet to see any positive responses to this new feature, and believe me, I have looked. In fact, several bloggers have already expressed negative views of something that should have been accepted so well.

What went wrong? Well, lets take a look. There are several thousands of communities that already exist on MBL. Many people, such as myself, have joined hundreds of those individually. Imagine if you have signed up for 200 or more communities, only to now have them each send a short message that says "I just wanted to say thanks for being a member." That is at least 200 messages, not to mention the fact that each of those sends a email update to your inbox which also floods your email account. Sound like spam?

Meg and Johnathan thought the same. One would think that the MBL team would take that fact into consideration beforehand, considering the spamming issues that plagued the site in 2006 until it asked users for assistance solving the problem last December on its blog.

Hopefully, the site will realize how much of a hassle and problem the new community messaging feature is and revert back to the old format, but little action has been taken as of yet. Currently, if you ask what you should do, the response will likely just tell you to leave the spammer's community. Is this really necessary though, as I would not consider every community that sends a message with the new feature to be a spammer. Nor would I want to go through the process of unsubscribing from each of these communities one by one, which is what it would take.

For now, if you are unsatisfied, you have the option of turning off email notification in your settings, and contacting & informing MyBlogLog of how much you despise their thoughtful yet poorly planned new tool. You can also post your suggestions for the service on their suggestion board.

What is your opinion on the new community messaging tool? Do you love it or hate it? Should this feature be removed? I want to hear what you have to say. Leave your comments for discussion.

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33 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Avinash - July 04, 2007 at 07:57 am PDT

Wonderful post, Michael! Perhaps even I couldn’t describe the problem better than you did.

What is your opinion on the new community messaging tool? Do you love it or hate it? Should this feature be removed?

I’d certainly love this feature if there was an option to opt out of community messaging and that’s what I’ve been demanding since they made this feature available to their members. I certainly don’t support the complete removal of this feature.

The mass messaging feature is great if they provide an opt out option. I don’t know how many people asked them to add such an incomplete feature like this but I’m not ready to digest that only the people who have joined 300 or more communities are against this feature.

Anybody who doesn’t want unwanted messages is certainly against it. I visit thousands of blogs/day and have found that many people are leaving MyBlogLog and joining Blog Catalog since the day this mass-spamming process has started.

I certainly don’t expect an incomplete + useless feature release from a Yahoo! owned company. MBL folks are breaking many rules by trying to cover their mistake. They pointed their finger at people like me who have joined hundreds of thousands of communities but the fact is that their bulk messaging stuff is completely ignoring the CAN-SPAM Act.

I’ve noticed that a few supporters of this feature have said that people joined hundreds of communities to increase site visibility. If what they say is true, why are the same people who joined hundreds of communities against this feature? If we needed more visibility, we’d just stay quiet so we could earn much better visibility by using this mass-spamming tool, no?

Someone wrote that many people joined hundreds of communities that they have no interest in. Someone also wrote that people join hundreds of communities for “search engine optimization” purpose so they can earn more money by clicks on advertisements. Now what is that? Am I the only person who thinks that the person who made this point should spend rest of his life learning about SEO, Internet Marketing, Website Monetization and Web Analytics properly so he’s able to understand the difference between all these different web business segments?

Currently, if someone goes to Eric and speaks against this feature, Eric asks:

Given that you think that receiving a monthly email from the author is spam. Why are you a part of their community? What specific benefits are you gaining?

I’ve a question for Eric. Can he guarantee that people will only be sending community messages once in a month?

If he can’t guarantee, I’ll take it as he killed (read ‘erased’) his own question and I don’t need to answer the question anymore.

Being a community member doesn’t mean that the community owner automatically earned the right to send messages in bulk to the community members. When we joined a community, neither we allowed the community owner to send us his community notifications (because no questions regarding community notifications were asked), nor it was written in the MyBlogLog ToS that by joining a community, we are automatically giving a community owner the right to send his personal community crap.

I can’t understand how is it so hard for the MBL team to understand that NO ONE (except a few exceptions!) wants to receive unwanted messages, no matter if he is a MBL community member or a member of community forums like SitePoint and Digital Point.

- Avi
Matt Ellsworth - July 04, 2007 at 11:09 am PDT

I think that those that start to abuse it will quickly find the number of members in their communities drop.
Leslie Poston - July 04, 2007 at 11:17 am PDT

I hate this new feature. Spam spam spammity spam. I turned off email notification for now, but I shouldn’t have to. then again, I was already peeved that I have to look at the stupid tag board ahead of all the blogs on MBL page now too, and that emails asking to have that moved to the bottom of the page have gone ignored.
Vlad - July 04, 2007 at 11:48 am PDT

I have not used this new feature yet…. I do see potential problems with spammers.
Steve S - July 04, 2007 at 02:14 pm PDT

Yea, a lot of communities mean well but they see themselves as acting in a bubble. I get so many of these messages each day now that it supersedes some of the legitimate messages that I receive.
Meg - July 04, 2007 at 04:06 pm PDT

Michael,

Thanks for posting about this. Obviously I’m very much against it - especially when there’s an easy solution to keep everybody happy.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - July 04, 2007 at 04:08 pm PDT

I like it, if for no other reason than it will get some of these folks who join 100s of communities to drop a whole mess of them. Seriously, if you belong to 200 or more communities, why bother? I read more blogs than that in feeds, but the actual number that I visit is far lower. MBL has long been too much of a venue for those who join 100s of communities and leave inane messages; I’d love to see it get to a worthwhile network, and I think the fallout from this may actually help.
Brandon - July 05, 2007 at 12:37 am PDT

I hadn’t seen this mass pm feature for MBL yet. I’ve only started using MBL to network and have seen some positive results so far.
I worry that this mass pm will cause some serious spam..
Svetlana Gladkova - July 05, 2007 at 03:53 am PDT

I guess I will actually support Cyndy here in her opinion that people that manually join hundreds of communities for visibility kind of deserve it. Well, honestly, I’ve been using MyBlogLog for more than half a year now on Profy and I never join communities manually, I only join them after actually visiting a blog 10 times. Results? I only got 2 mass messages from my communities because I am only part of 56 communities.

But I am a strong supporter of the idea for users to be able to opt out of getting mass messages from all communities or from selected ones. Besides, it would have been a wise idea, I guess, to actually limit the number of messages a community owner can send to members monthly.

In the form it is now this tool definitely needs changes and I guess people from MBL should have discussed the idea with the community prior to releasing the feature.

But anyway today I have received a new email from MBL mentioning 2 communities I have just joined after visiting each of them 10 times - Meg’s Dipping into the Blogpond and MBL’s own blog. This is a nice notification, I never received such messages before and I suppose it is the first move from MBL people to improve the situation with community spamming issues.

And can anyone tell me that he (or she) actually gained some results or visibility for his or her blog by joining numerous communities? Honestly, I only visit 1 of 10 (or even 20 maybe) bloggers that join Profy community on MBL (first of all, because I know that they never even visited here).
Avinash - July 05, 2007 at 04:54 am PDT

people that manually join hundreds of communities for visibility kind of deserve it.

I joined hundreds of communities so did thousands of other MBL members. Now, since a few thousand member read lots of blogs, they deserve it. People who read a few blogs and joined much less MBL communities than the people like me, they don’t deserve it. The joy of generalization! Fair enough!

May I ask if there is a measurement for spammers? How do you decide if someone joined many communities to increase site visibility or for the sake of helping his/her friends or s/he is just a blog-worm type?

I think that you should also think about the people who add 3000+ contacts in their contact list THAT I think is a plain marketing/site visibility trick. As far as I remember, I’ve manually added only 20 or 25 people in my contact list. All the other contacts that anybody can see in my contact list are the people who added me in their contact list. I visited their profiles, found them related to my niche/interest and then added them back in my list.

I still have 280+ people in “My Admirers” list. They have been there for months and I haven’t added them in my list. I don’t think a person can manage more than 3 or 4 hundred contacts (max). Well, at least I can’t because I just don’t have enough time for them. I spend hours visiting, discovering and reading blogs and I enjoy what I’m doing.

If I find a new blog interesting, I add it @ StumbleUpon/BlinkList so the blog owner can get better visibility. If I discover a cool blog via MyBlogLog and it has too few members/feed subscribers, I join the blog community as well as subscribe to its feed.

I don’t think how all these things help me improve MY own visibility. Maybe someone will be kind enough to waste his/her time trying to explain how exactly it increases the chance of better visibility for my blogs because I just don’t get it when people say that someone joined so many communities to be more visible.

But anyway today I have received a new email from MBL mentioning 2 communities I have just joined after visiting each of them 10 times - Meg’s Dipping into the Blogpond and MBL’s own blog. This is a nice notification, I never received such messages before and I suppose it is the first move from MBL people to improve the situation with community spamming issues.

I believe that this feature isn’t a first move from MBL people to improve the situation with community spamming issues because I’ve received tons of such messages whenever I’ve visited a blog 10 times. When the system automatically adds you under any community, you receive such notifications. That’s nothing new.

And can anyone tell me that he (or she) actually gained some results or visibility for his or her blog by joining numerous communities?

Since I’ve joined a few thousand communities and so have done more than 50% people in my contact list, I should be much more visible over at MyBlogLog than others, right? Wrong.

MyBlogLog can provide you better visibility ONLY if you visit many blogs that have MyBlogLog widget installed in the sidebar. If any month, I stop visiting thousands of such blogs, I get 15 or 20 visits from MyBlogLog in that particular month.

If you wanna see the proof, I’ll be posting a screenshot of my Google Analytics report in my next article about MyBlogLog’s spammy history.
Avinash - July 05, 2007 at 05:02 am PDT

And one more thing:

It was never my intention to improve better visibility by joining thousands of communities because I believe that joining many community doesn’t increase your chances to be more visibile, adding gazillions of people in your contact list does.

I could easily improve the chances of being more visible just by visiting the blogs in the MBL directory. There was no need to waste hours joining each and every blog community.
Meg - July 05, 2007 at 05:25 am PDT

Svetlana,

I wish people would get off the notion that people join communities purely for exposure! MBL is shocking as a referral for traffic - in the last two months it’s referred just 1% of my total traffic - and ironically 20% of that has been in the last 5 days. If I were to put a value on the time I spend exploring blogs (communities) on MBL, and exposure was what I was after, I could tell you there’d be much more efficient ways of doing it!

And heck, it’s certainly not for the money - I whacked on some adsense, as an experiment, just 3 weeks ago (way after joining hundreds of communities), and I think I’d nearly be able to afford a cocktail - fancy that in just 3 weeks w00t - this networking is really paying off
Svetlana Gladkova - July 05, 2007 at 05:46 am PDT

Avi:

Maybe the word “deserve” was not absolutely correct. What I actually mean is that they used MBL for what I call hidden spam – joining the communities without reading a single post from the blogs only for the sake of having their avatars everywhere. Definitely this is not what MBL was first intended for, am I right? We were supposed to join the communities we visit often, not join the communities to be everywhere, right? And if we consider this a hidden spam it is just that they face spam themselves.

As for my criterion for people joining the communities legally or for self-promotion is absolutely simple: when you own a community that is not incredibly large (as Profy’s is) you usually notice all the new readers and especially those coming back again and again. And if you notice new members you have never seen in your blog’s MBL widget it is the first reason to be suspicious. And the second criterion is what these members write in the communities’ messages boards. “Nice blog” is definitely not a comment from a member that actually read my blog, I don’t believe in such comments and I never return visits to the blogs they invite me to. I rarely use the “Report spam” feature because I can not be 100 per cent sure but still I believe it is spam only intended for the message to be displayed in our community page. But I often delete such messages because I would prefer visitors to see legitimate comments from our actual readers – and I will be happy to let our visitors see them and visit their blogs as well. I guess it is not really difficult to see if you have a legitimate community member or not.

And yes, I definitely consider adding contacts on MyBlogLog as the same hidden spam self-promoting measure. I only have a handful of people I actually know on my contacts – the majority represent people that added me and I added them in return only because I am kind of uncomfortable with having a crowd of friends  And I actually envy you that you are able to keep “admirers” there.

As for visibility for your own blog, your actions after discovering a new blog are really to be admired (this is exactly what I do myself though I do not join MBL communities if I do not come back from the feed I subscribed to). Definitely, this is not something that could help you attract new people to visit YOUR blog. BUT I was actually talking about people adding people as contacts, joining hundreds of communities and leaving the same “Nice blog, visit mine at …” message can expect that people visiting this community will be inclined to actually click through. I am not sure if it actually helps or not, really – I just know such activities exist and I am not happy with them. Moreover, I think it is not what MBL was created for and gathered the community of such diverse bloggers (BTW, it is really nice to meet you and have an opportunity for such a discussion with you).

As for the email with my new communities, in fact, this is the first time I received such a message myself though there is a number of communities out of those 56 I am member of I joined automatically after visiting them 10 times. Probably it was a glitch that I have never received it before and now I have. But you have proven my theory is wrong but it’s Ok, such notifications could never change the overall situation with community messaging feature.

And again, I never mentioned you yourself joined the communities for self-promotion, I just know such activities exist and that’s what I call hidden spam. Definitely you are not the person to be accused of such activities. I guess I have explained my position about self-promotion on MBL quite clear above.
Svetlana Gladkova - July 05, 2007 at 05:51 am PDT

Meg, since I happen to know you as a perfectly legitimate MBL user I never actually talked about you as joining communities for visibility. Please, take a look at my comment to Avi above, I explained what I meant by visibility. I know perfectly well MBL is an incredibly POOR traffic source myself and I never used it in such a way. But I know that after first joining the majority of the people tend to think that adding thousands of contacts and joining thousands of communities and leaving copy-paste messages to all of them will BOOST their traffic. That’s what I meant by looking for visibility. But I believe people realize eventually it does not help but the first move is to try self-promotion on MBL, that’s what I know for sure.
Avinash - July 05, 2007 at 09:36 pm PDT

And if you notice new members you have never seen in your blog’s MBL widget it is the first reason to be suspicious.

No matter if your MBL community has only 2 or 3 hundred members, I believe that you are not watching your MBL widget in the sidebar all the time and this way, you can miss many people who visit your blog (i.e. If your blog receives 500+ visits/day). In Profy’s case, I think you should be getting much more visits on a daily basis.

One more thing that you should notice that MyBlogLog has provided a wonderful privacy facility to every MBL who doesn’t want to appear in your MBL widget. Such a person can click the tiny red icon on his avatar and you’ll never be able to see ‘em appearing again on your widget. So it’s clear that you can’t depend on such a measurement to identify a spammer.

The second criterion that you mentioned in your comment is the only way to identify spammers, that too is not a valid criterion.

You don’t like such comments, neither do I. But again, I’ve noticed that when a few popular bloggers visit your MBL profile, they’ll write their messages only in a 2 or 3 words. Now, this doesn’t mean that they automatically become spammers. Maybe they just don’t have enough time to write a long message.

IF someone left a message on your profile saying “Nice blog! I enjoyed my visit” and you see a link included, THAT certainly is a spammer’s sign. Such people used to visit hundreds of MBL communities every day to leave messages for the sake of improving their site visibility.

Most of the time, I notice that such people haven’t really visited your blog but they do add that “I visited your blog and enjoyed the visit. Really nice blog. Do visit mine”. When I realize that they haven’t really visited, I feel like pushing ‘em in a mud-pool!

Anyway, I’m glad that you clearly explained who are spammers and who aren’t.

Cheers!
- Avi
Svetlana Gladkova - July 06, 2007 at 12:33 am PDT

Sure, we have a much higher number of visits daily but somehow it happens that I really watch the sidebar widget at least some 20% of my time - whenever I reply to comments on Profy, write something myself or edit articles of our authors I can see the widget. And actually I try to notice and remember new MBL avatars I see. Besides, the majority of our readers are not MBL users so the number of daily MBL readers is not actually hard to track.

But you are right, this is not the perfectly precise measure to identify spammers (especially given the privacy option some MBL users apply) but COMBINED with receiving spammy messages from these users under suspicion I think I can actually come to the conclusion. And as far as I remember, I never received a message sounding “I hope we can become good blog friend. Warmly welcome you to visit my blog at…” or something even shorter and less polite from a popular blogger (or from anyone who actually visited Profy prior to sending this message). And I never talked of short messages, I only talked about people leaving the messages similar to the one you quoted - these messages are spammy and if I don’t see a user actually visiting and reading Profy and I receive such a message from him (or her) I can definitely identify this user as spammer. And I understand your “pushing ‘em in a mud-pool” feeling perfectly well, that’s what I feel and that’s why I always delete such messages - I do not want to have these messages in our community page.

Again, thank you for your participation in this discussion, it is really a pleasure
Ian Kennedy - July 12, 2007 at 11:42 pm PDT

A quick note to let you know that the team today added the ability to opt-out of the Community Message email. For details, see my post at:

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/07/at-your-service.html
Svetlana Gladkova - July 13, 2007 at 08:32 am PDT

Thanks for letting us know, it is really good to know MBL people actually paid attention to this discussion (and pretty sure tons of other discussions on other blogs). That’s a wise move. I wish you also added a limit on the number of messages a community owner can send to members per month, it would have make even more people happy, I guess.
Mrs. Mecomber - November 26, 2007 at 09:04 am PDT

I’d love to be able to access MyBlogLog account again… someday… in the sweet by and by.

Since I was forced to merge my account with Yahoo, I’ve been locked out of my account. Looks like others are having the same problems. The idiots. No one answers my please for help, either.

So THUMBS DOWN to MyBlogLog. what good is a tool that you can’t access?????
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