Author Topic: Istock's new Zero Tolerance Policy for keyword SPAM (Read 14484 times)

lisafx · « **on:** October 10, 2008, 15:54 »

Istock will be deactivating the portfolios of serial spammers according to this quote from Bitter:

In 7 days, we will begin contacting contributors and giving them advanced warning. We will be deactivating the portfolios of contributors in clear violation of our keyword policies. Please have a look through your portfolio to make sure that none of your isolated bell peppers are keyworded as 'Christmas' or 'business'. A few errors on a few files are totally understandable and we'll help you fix those eventually. What we're pursuing here is the serial spammer. You probably know who you are. If you don't, I guess you soon will. We're happy to answer any questions you might have in the mean time.

Here's the forum thread, including Bitter's complete statement:
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=77912&page=1

leaf · « **Reply #1 on:** October 10, 2008, 15:56 »

well that is good they are cracking down on spammers. That is something that probably really turns buyers away. I just hope I don't get singled out

CvanDijk · « **Reply #2 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:11 »

That's a good thing. Thank you Lisa for noticing us here to the forum thread.

yingyang0 · « **Reply #3 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:18 »

I'm very happy about this. When the wiki first came out I wiki'ed a lot of files and the only effect it had was to see a red "bling" show up on my profile. It drove me nuts when I found the same search spammed by the same people after they had already been wiki'ed. The one that drove me the craziest was when I was trying to buy a photo of las vegas. Every tom, dick, and harry had spammed their isolated photo of cards, dice, and chips with the keyword las vegas.

melastmohican · « **Reply #4 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:31 »

How they area going to do this? Will they check every single photo, 4M of them???

CofkoCof · « **Reply #5 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:36 »

I think they already know most of the spammers + it's not hard to find them (# of times a user had his keywords wikied, do some basic searches like business, christmas,....). Luckily most of my files got accepted after the stronger inspection rules regarding keywords, but I think many peple will have a lot of work to do

stormchaser · « **Reply #6 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:40 »

Don't care how they do it. It is good policy though.

When I used to buy images regularly, keyword spam was the biggest time waster for me. In fact, it probably even resulted in less sales for the agencies, at least from me. It was just tiring wading through so many images that were not even close to what I needed.

On one site I did a recent search for Blue Ribbon hoping I would come up with one such as for a county fair prize. In the first search results, there were many, many, many that were neither blue, nor were they any type of ribbon.

melastmohican · « **Reply #7 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:41 »

What does it mean to "get wikied" :-D

madelaide · « **Reply #8 on:** October 10, 2008, 16:41 »

I think rules have to be set VERY clearly.

I once complained with the keyword person (Jennifer, I think it's her name) that it is unfair to remove stretches (such as halloween for a pumpkin) from some images when tons of others have them, because the "correctly" keyworded images get disadvantaged behind the others. It's quite different from having a photo of a blue satin sheet background with "red" and "green" as keywords.

Try a search for "red satin sheet" and you will find that red can have the strangest hues. Or that I have a vision impairment and colors look different....

Regards,
Adelaide

lisafx · « **Reply #9 on:** October 10, 2008, 18:25 »

I'm all for this if it works as promised and only the chronic, repeated, and deliberate spammers are targeted. I agree spam is a big problem and I have seen some horrendous examples of it.

If regular folks with just the occasional undisambiguated file or gray area conceptual words are caught in the net, that will be a problem.

pancaketom · « **Reply #10 on:** October 10, 2008, 18:40 »

This COULD be a good thing, or they could mess it up horribly. knowing IS, I'm not placing any bets. If they go after people who have a few weird keywords (mostly due to their weird limited CV mapping), then it will be horrible, if they take out the serial purposeful spammers, it will be a good first step.

They also need to get rid of the weird default terms for multiple choice keywords to remove the huge advantage enjoyed by images spammed with those default terms.

It might be a hopeless battle, but if they can pull it off properly, it will drag the other sites (other than DT, which seems to have it fairly under control) to take action. Good luck to them.

--=Tom

stormchaser · « **Reply #11 on:** October 10, 2008, 19:08 »

Quote from: madelaide on October 10, 2008, 16:41

It's quite different from having a photo of a blue satin sheet background with "red" and "green" as keywords.

Try a search for "red satin sheet" and you will find that red can have the strangest hues. Or that I have a vision impairment and colors look different....

Regards,
Adelaide

Yes like orange and lime green. No, you're not vision impaired

lathspell · « **Reply #12 on:** October 10, 2008, 19:58 »

*giggle* I admit that I'm not totally innocent ("Innocent? Who's inncocent?") but I know 2-3 large portfolios with thousand(s) of pictures to correct which are keyword-spammed far beyond any limits. Good luck boys - or should I say "doom on you!"?

Given the fact that (IMO) there are no capable bulk tools editing all these pics must be a job for weeks ...

crazychristina · « **Reply #13 on:** October 10, 2008, 21:21 »

Where they draw the line will be the test of this new policy. I suspect those large portfolios will get by as not being 'sufficiently blatant' spamming.

jsnover · « **Reply #14 on:** October 11, 2008, 01:26 »

Quote from: lisafx on October 10, 2008, 18:25

I'm all for this if it works as promised and only the chronic, repeated, and deliberate spammers are targeted. I agree spam is a big problem and I have seen some horrendous examples of it.

If regular folks with just the occasional undisambiguated file or gray area conceptual words are caught in the net, that will be a problem.

I'm hoping that it is targeting the 5-10% of contributors who represent 80% of the spam problem. If some honest mistakes get caught up in this we should make lots of loud noise about that so that it can get fixed - IS can and has remedied situations where they've blown it and contributors have taken them to task about it. Don't be silent about problems if they occur.

We have sanctions in the criminal law because it's clear that without them, many people would just do whatever they feel like. IS has just imposed some penalties that will be the slap up the side of the head that the worst offenders need. Asking nicely and laying out the rules in articles hasn't worked, unfortunately.

Peter · « **Reply #15 on:** October 11, 2008, 01:56 »

Even if I wanted to spam (but I didnt), I couldnt, they even throw away relevant keywords from my images, not to mention possilble irelevant. lol.

CofkoCof · « **Reply #16 on:** October 11, 2008, 02:02 »

Quote from: melastmohican on October 10, 2008, 16:41

What does it mean to "get wikied" :-D

There's a button called "Report inaccurate keywords" just above the keywords of other peoples images. You can suggest the wrong keywords and keyword inspection team removes the inaccurate keywords and even adds some missing ones.

phildate · « **Reply #17 on:** October 11, 2008, 02:19 »

I am all for this policy, as would any serious microstock photographer who doesn't resort to spam keywords to increase sales. However I have a few slight concerns...

1. I have thousands of files, which I cannot guarantee do not contain the odd inappropriate word. Things got so messed up with the disambiguation fiasco that I am sure some files have not been completely d'aed correctly. I am sure there are many others like me too.

2. Why don't they sort out the default setting so that they are either all on or all off, when there are multiple meanings for a search term. Everyone thinks this is a good idea and would prevent spam so I can't understand why IS won't do this. We are prepared to do our bit, why won't they?!

3. I hope this doesn't give IS a reason/excuse to pick on non-exclusives. I can imagine Sean coming in and slamming me for writing this but given the meagre non-exclusive uploads and the new best match, as a non-exclusive I am NOT feeling the love from iStock anymore.

litifeta · « **Reply #18 on:** October 11, 2008, 03:10 »

Sounds like an ideal way to disable your portfolio with them. It was the first site I submitted to, and the one that gives me the most grief. After 2 years I am still stuck on below 50 images despite submitting thousands.

I am on their blacklist I am sure.

The keywording at istock is stupid. It is pain in the a55. And they have this thing where people suggest your keywords are wrong. Like on a blank billboard they took off "road sign" because it was inappropriate.

stokfoto · « **Reply #19 on:** October 11, 2008, 03:23 »

it sounds good to me but I hope they will implement this reasonably.
as for spotting the real spammers shouldn't be that difficult task for example to begin with a quick search for the most popular kws like business sexy and as mentioned above xmas:) would return
I never keyword spammed but just in case I am going to go through my porfolio to see if there are some borderline(risky) keywords in order to be on the safe side.

bittersweet · « **Reply #20 on:** October 11, 2008, 07:54 »

Quote from: litifeta on October 11, 2008, 03:10

Sounds like an ideal way to disable your portfolio with them.

I'd say there are more efficient ways to do that. For example, sending an email to support. That's all it takes. Unlike a few other sites, they have never been big on holding people hostage who didn't want to be there. The only waiting period that I know of in terms of leaving is the 30 days you have to wait once you quit exclusivity before you can upload to another site. Even then, you can remove your entire portfolio immediately if that is what you want to do.

They have made pretty clear that this keyword thing is not going to be automatic, and that even the most heinous offenders will be notified BEFORE their portfolio is disabled, and will be given yet another deadline for cleaning up their mess.

jsnover · « **Reply #21 on:** October 11, 2008, 16:15 »

Quote from: litifeta on October 11, 2008, 03:10

The keywording at istock is stupid. It is pain in the a55. And they have this thing where people suggest your keywords are wrong. Like on a blank billboard they took off "road sign" because it was inappropriate.

But there is an appropriate CV term, Billboard (Commercial Sign), for this. A road sign is one of those that tells about bends, speed limits, yield signs, stop signs, etc. Road sign is inappropriate for a billboard.

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #22 on:** October 11, 2008, 16:39 »

Quote from: jsnover on October 11, 2008, 16:15

Quote from: litifeta on October 11, 2008, 03:10
The keywording at istock is stupid. It is pain in the a55. And they have this thing where people suggest your keywords are wrong. Like on a blank billboard they took off "road sign" because it was inappropriate.

But there is an appropriate CV term, Billboard (Commercial Sign), for this. A road sign is one of those that tells about bends, speed limits, yield signs, stop signs, etc. Road sign is inappropriate for a billboard.

That's the problem. There are blatant spammers and then there's the rest of us who just may have a different understanding of what a word means in the CV. I don't think they've made it clear who they're going after.

I had "inside" removed for an image of an object that was inside of a case. I think that was an appropriate keyword. I wonder how they plan on addressing this.

le_cyclope · « **Reply #23 on:** October 11, 2008, 18:54 »

There is a distinction between wrong keyword and spam. And I think that IS will adress it.
Quote: «We know that people make mistakes. That language can be tricky, and that keywording can be genuinely difficult. If you have a hard time keywording, we want to educate you, not punish you. The resources for proper keywords are available at everyone's fingertips. Here's something to get you started:

But beyond that, there are contributors here who include bad, inappropriate keywords on every single image they upload. Even worse, sometimes the spam is added after a file inspected. There are piles of bad keywords in huge portfolios. We've asked everyone to stop, to change, to improve. Lots of people listened. Some didn't. That's who we're going to have an issue with. »

A photo that has 2 or 3 «borderline» keywords out of 10 is not spammed. A photo that has 20 bad keywords out of 25 is. And these ones should be easy to spot.

So I'm pretty confident that IS will handle it correctly.

Claude

RH · « **Reply #24 on:** October 12, 2008, 04:45 »

Yes, of course, i´m agreeing with Claude!

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Author Topic: Istock's new Zero Tolerance Policy for keyword SPAM (Read 14484 times)

lisafx

leaf

CvanDijk

yingyang0

melastmohican

CofkoCof

stormchaser

melastmohican

madelaide

lisafx

pancaketom

stormchaser

lathspell

crazychristina

jsnover

Peter

CofkoCof

phildate

litifeta

stokfoto

bittersweet

jsnover

PaulieWalnuts

le_cyclope

RH

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