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Possibly Related Posts and trolls/attacks

  1. ardhra
    Member

    I'm a woman of colour and I blog about racial justice and feminism. I noticed that my blog was being linked to a racist/white supremacist site through the "possibly related posts" links, because it all seems to operate on keywords. Minutes after noticing that, I got a troll commenting at my site. I'm really wary about this because earlier this month another woman of colour blog was attacked by white supremacists. I blacklisted the IP address of the troll and disabled the Possibly Related Posts feature, but it doesn't deal with my concern about how prone to abuse this feature is. Especially by sites with extreme right-wing content, or which target social justice movements, since sites like that would naturally use similar terms to those in social justice blogs and they've attacked bloggers in the past.

    What, if anything, is WP doing to deal with the high potential for abuse that this feature brings?

  2. twitterpaters
    Member

    besides encouraging bloggers who would like to be read <i>and</i> not support hate speech to find another platform?

    apparently, not much...

    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27302

    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27298

  3. kiefferceramics
    Member

    Hi Ardhra, You can turn that feature off. Go to Design on your Dashboard, and check the second option under Extras. That doesn't solve your moral question, but might help with the direct problem. Best wishes

  4. matt
    Staff

    In the next few days we'll have an update that allows you to block specific blogs from showing up, and eventually that setting will also apply to the tag surfer, blog surfer, and top blogs so when you block a blog you should never see it again.

  5. ardhra
    Member

    twitterpaters, what platform would you suggest?

    kiefferceramics, read my post. I said very clearly that I disabled the feature.

    matt, blocking individual blogs won't make much of a difference when there are multiple blogs of the blocked kind out there. For this to be effective, one has to go out and search for white supremacist blogs and keep searching for them, since as WP boasts, thousands of new blogs are created every month... and who has the time to do that?

    This whole thing is placing undue burden on the shoulders of people who mind their own business, and throwing copious amounts of bait to trolls, stalkers, and abusers.

  6. ardhra
    Member

    Also, disabling the feature doesn't work. My posts are still showing up on other blogs in the 'possibly related posts' field.

  7. raincoaster
    Member

    I suppose then it only disables your display of Related Posts, and possibly display of your posts on other blogs going forward. Have you made any posts since your last report? If they show up somewhere, please let us know. A lot of people are interested in this.

  8. ardhra
    Member

    Except that Matt clearly says that "if you remove related posts from your blog we’ll remove you from other people’s blogs, so you won’t get traffic from that" in his announcement post, and it clearly says "Hide related links on this blog, which means this blog won’t show up on other’s blogs or get traffic that way" when you set the option to disable it.

    I haven't made newer posts, but older posts have been linked and I've been getting a small trickle of traffic from those links. It's possible they may have been linked before I disabled the feature, but I don't think that's good enough.

  9. raincoaster
    Member

    Yes, but he might not have made it retroactive is what I'm saying. Just as you say, "they may have been linked before I disabled the feature." I expect that our blogs were spidered and it was implimented pretty much automatically. Disabling it will apply from the point at which you disabled it forward, is what I'm suggesting. And yes, if that's how it works they should change that.

    I've parsed enough text from Matt and Automattic not to rule out anything or rule in anything till I've tested it; it's just that they have blind spots the same as everyone.

  10. philgroom
    Member

    This feature really does need more fine tuning: at the moment it’s all or nothing: there’s no way to moderate the links generated, no way of turning it on or off on a per-post basis; the links are not flagged up as auto-generated; and they only show when the post is viewed as a standalone page, not in the main blog.

    C'mon Matt - you guys can do better then this!

    My own response has been to post a warning to visitors on my 'About' page: no endorsement of auto-generated links is implied.

  11. fromtheleft
    Member

    ukcbdnews,

    I'm supporting Barack Obama for president.

    Since this "Related Links" feature was foisted upon us, for the first time, I've encountered a slew of really awful racist replies to my pro-Obama threads requiring deletion.

    This never happened before.

  12. fitnessfortheoccasion
    Member

    Something to consider: I think that inviting in trolls only supports your own cause. They tend to argue themselves into the ground in short order, and undermine their own beliefs.

  13. kayinmaine
    Member

    Guys, as you know, I get trolls all the time. What I do is string a line of garlic around my neck, wear a hazmat suit, and drive really fast so they can't find me! It doesn't always work, but it does reduce the number that come to my blog. LOL ;-)

    Hope this helps.

  14. kayinmaine
    Member

    By the way, I switched to TypePad because I was having trouble with my WordPress blog when I would point my domain to their server (it would cause an Error 404). Well, I hate the TypePad dashboard! So confusing.

    I miss you guys. ;-)

  15. raincoaster
    Member

    The 404 error is not unheard of when you use domain mapping if one or two steps have been skipped. We could walk you through that issue and you might be able to come back.

    I, personally, HATE Typepad. It's so 1998.

  16. kayinmaine
    Member

    Thank you Raincoaster! I can't stand TypePad! Luckily I've signed up monthly so I'm only out $14.95, but man....I am just so unhappy over there.

    Let me know what I need to do. Thank you!

    Signed,

    Very Unhappy With Typepad at the Moment

  17. raincoaster
    Member

    Hmm, well all the USEFUL and relevant threads I can find seem to have been closed, so I suggest you start a new one. We don't want to hijack this thread. In the meantime, here is some background reading so maybe you can figure out what happened from this:
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=20573&replies=18#post-156832
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=7111&replies=5#post-46318
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=14681&replies=3#post-107138

  18. kayinmaine
    Member

    Thank you Raincoaster. I appreciate it. *waving to Fitnessfortheoccassion & From the Left*

    ;-)

  19. ardhra
    Member

    I'm glad this is being taken seriously and that Matt and the WP crew are working on it.

  20. membracid
    Member

    And I'm glad that I discovered your blog via this thread--at least one good thing has come of this! I really like it. :)

    I have a similar problem to yours: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic.php?id=27329&replies=30#post-196314

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