iusethis has been plagued with app spammers lately, people who register bogus apps in order to gain traffic/page rank for their craptacolous schemes, or register a bunch of useless windows apps. So far, we've just deleted these apps as soon as they have been discovered, but unfortunately, it still ends up in the new apps rss feed for some of our users, and lately it has become so frequent that we've decided we have to do something.
So, from today we introduce the concept of trusted iusethis users. That means if you've registered a valid app, or added a good review to an app, we flag your user as trusted, so your releases and new apps will show up directly in the feeds. Otherwise, they will be held pending moderation from one of our admins.
Since the user filter was mostly added to counter spam apps appearing on the front page, we're also changing the default setting to show all trusted apps on the frontpage. You can still chose to browse at another usage level if you prefer.
Excellent! I’ve been annoyed by spam submissions lately and this is the approach successfully taken by Ma.gnolia with its Gardeners program, so I think this should help considerably.
I wonder if it might make sense to allow trusted users to have other moderation abilities or tools? I understand that that level of overhead probably isn’t necessary, but it might be useful, over time, to seed out other “gardening” responsibilities to your members?
Yeah, it’s definitively a direction we want to go (something like the gardening project). The current trust is a bit to wide to grant extensive privileges tho, we probably need a level between admin and trusted, for instance we trust app authors to not spam, but we might not trust them to add/approve valuable unbiased content.