In the first case of vandalism, the saboteur(s) were probably blondes "getting even" for the slight implied by the group name.

Cheers,

Matthew

. . . . and guys too: LESS SPAM!

hey wait minute, is this SPAM?

"They include anti-flood technology"

What the...? Myspace doesn't have any kind of flood controls?

Every CMS and message board I've ever used has flood controls, it is genuinely shocking if Myspace doesn't.

As a member of the World Artist Network, one of the groups mentioned in the article, I can attest to the fact that W.A.N. is a huge artist community. The group even has a real world gallery located in Baltimore, Maryland. Unfortunately, this latest bout with spammers has made the group a shadow of it's former self, and MySpace has done nothing (so far as I can see) about it. Get off your collective asses, MySpace!

You remember Myspace - where 13-year-old girls go to meet 40-year-old men, and where 40-year-old men go to meet law enforcement agents posing as 13-year-old girls.

Other than the huge waste of electrical power and bandwidth represented by the mere existence of Myspace, who cares if it's full of spam? It's useless and without merit anyhow.

Well, every moderator knows that in the intarweb world, the first thing you should very much do as soon as you create a group is set it to private and make it mandatory for new members to be moderated twice - once during signing up and then again on the first 10 posts made by the member.

Just recently got onto myspace, am seeing benefits as well as the obvious issues. The most significant downside, it seems to me, is the centralization of it all on one server farm, one platform, one database. Mightn't it be better to do this using a more distributed technology? Perhaps a way to squirt enough webapp code (could be multilingual, Perl and PHP and server-side Java and Ruby and anything else that can support the APIs) onto three or four different major web-server architectures, to allow us to weld our own $10/month web spaces on tens of thousands of different servers, into one coherent whole which we all independently control most carefully for our own benefit and the benefit of all. And then when we have such a distributed setup, all of us participating make money exactly the way myspace does, to the limit of the capacity of the web space we are either renting or owning.

This would be not entirely unlike IRC in distributed nature, but myspace-like instead in utility, and using unspecialized hardware and software, both rented space and owned servers, with real income-production potential. In other words, the first distributed, non-monolithic, Web 2.0 project.

Anyone care to try?

J.E.B.

With groups this large it's hard to monitor everyone who wants to join, especially those with private profiles. 100+ people a day wanting to join gets tiring after awhile especially when you have a life outside of myspace.

I disagree with Matthew though. BKA (brunettes kick ass) is/was a very close-knit group whose members actually care about each other. Awhile back, a member was deleted off myspace for making physical threats and sexually harassing members. Ever since then he's been making new profiles to continue to harass the group under private profiles. So yes, it's not the work of a blonde's revenge.

It would be nice to have more control over groups. It's too bad myspace can't ban IP addresses

It's not YOUR space, it's THEIR space, and if it f***s up, well... sux 4 u!!!

I have no idea why people spend all that effort building a "my"space "community" ffs. It is not yours! It can be taken away from you! What would all those DJs do about getting gigs if their page was suddenly deleted? (true story) What? you built your business model on the idea that MySpace would provide you with everything and it wouldn't go wrong? o. m. g. Did you even read the terms and conditions?

It's like making an ice sculpture in a desert and then complaining that it melted.

Get a clue. Get your own freaking webspace with a guarantee of service and no ridiculous copyright capitulation. Keep your myspace just because everybody else has one (but don't worry, that fad will pass, myspace is the new flared trousers)

oh, and J.E.B. what you are talking about is called the world wide web.

Surely there's a basic architecture problem when deleting posts (at system administrator level, no less) doesn't eradicate those posts from the group's view? And when MySpace can't change a programming oversight to actually be useful in the working environment...

Please don't use the expression 'spray an unending stream of scat porn' again, it's slightly too descriptive for my liking.

I am amused at these people who are complaining that their centralised system designed for groups of less than 100 user communities is suffering at the high end.

Get your own system, run your own software! Cheap bastards!

that's right. i think myspace is great if you want to share music you have composed or other things you would like to share, such as artwork or blogs. it's free and you can find other artists like you which i think its great. you can get talking to other artists and maybe even play gigs together or whatever.

so those of you ranting on about being cheap bastards and go-get-your-own-website, you seem to forget that some people do not have money to splash out on websites and buying domain names and myspace is as good as it will get for them. and while there exists simple technological tools to crub spam, i don't see why it shouldn't be applied.

It's always been a horribly designed site where a good portion of features weren't working. Myspace got lucky when users were fleeing Friendster and that's what they capitalised on. Right now they need to fix their architecture or people will flee elsewhere... Facebook anyone?

Maybe Murdoch's made enough money now and is ready to let this ship go down?

myspace looks like and i suspect has in large parts been made entirly on a rainy Saturday, by some fartknocker with the ability to drag and drop.

Given a site of its size coldfusion seems like an odd choice for its development, that lack of any real input filtration, remember when it first launched when u were able to inject an IFRAME and totally hide the contents of your page with a page hosted elsewhere or in other words have a perfect phishing shelter

Similarly why any script is able to get through the filters is absurd to me, it really isn't that difficult to filter out the majority of methods used in XSS (disallowing script tags and the string 'eval(' goes a long long way to mitigating the damage), hell even requests for remote resources like all the cunningly concealed tracking packages disguised as 'fun' personality tests should be filtered by there mime type at the very least

but given the general deficiencies in there client interface, im not surprised that the administrative interface can do something simple like delete the post from multiple pages, most likely they delete the post body but fail to delete the update to the thread, so they delete out of one table and leave it in another

have they never heard of cascade delete????, u know that usefull db function which deletes records directly related to the record deleted?