I only became aware of spamming when looking at keywords attached to files simliar to mine before uploading for inspection.I was shooting in a musuem/tropical greenhouse yesterday and took a few photos of a lemon tree.Just put "lemon" "tree" into the istock search engine and two good sellers hit you but the keywords are pathetic and i removed 16 when i wikied the file.
Is istockphoto still hoping contributors don;t spam.
Is the 4 million files in the library spam free.
Can a contributor add crap keywords after it is accepted and placed in the library<<< yes, but why ? lock down the puppy and if you wish to add keywords later site mail support.

I think all the sites should limit us to 10 keywords.  It would be great if none of us spammed but I often see the highest selling images have loads of inappropriate keywords.

Locking the keywords after review wont work because reviewers often reject appropriate keywords.  Sometimes they don't know when a word is spam and when it is vital to the image.  There are lots of posts about that in this forum.  I now use the minimum keywords and add more after the file has been accepted.

I don't understand how spamming could increase sales how come a buyer would   buy a bunch of flowers while they are searching for image of a businessman(but on subscription site spamming could work though)
anyway 10 keywords sometimes might not enough to include all important  aspects of an image.and disabling photographers right to add or remove keywords  after approval or limiting  number of keywords would (to my point of view)be  in  a way punishing decent contributes for immoral act of spammers. I think instead they should implement hard  penalties to those who are clearly spammers and   contributors or buyers  could  report inappropriate keywords. I also don't like the idea of conceptual keywords being left out  and considered as irrelevant if not spamming.(which happens at IS)
imagine having a portrait of a kid smiling and not being allowed to include the "happy" as keyword. 

Is announced that it was starting a new procedure for dealing with spammers. They were giving everyone an undisclosed amount of time to clean up their portfolios before they started dropping the hammer. After that any serial spammers would be given a personal invitation through sitemail to clean up their stuff. If they didn't clean it up then their ability to edit and/or upload images would be suspended until they cleaned up their act. I think they mentioned that the images would be removed from searches as well but I'm not sure.

The announcement was made a month or so ago. I don't know that any attempt to clean up the spam will help. First the reviewers and wiki editors are well known for removing relevant keywords from images. Secondly, there are several important contributors over there with seriously spammed portfolios.

I gave up on worrying about trying to wiki files after I realized that without a serious consequence the spamming would never stop. It's not that big of an inconvenience to add the removed words back in and that is really the only current consequence of getting caught.

Thanks for the link. I had hopes that they were serious about cleaning it up. In theory they should have been sending out notices starting Oct 17th or so. The problem is that we are now in early December and that orange is still keyworded as apple.

I think the most effective solution would be weighted keywords--each contributor gets a certain number of "points" per image, and assigns a certain number of those points to each keyword.  The more points, the earlier the image shows up in search results for that specific keyword.  A would-be spammer would be wasting his points on irrelevant or peripheral keywords and reducing the number of points he has to "spend" on other, more relevant keywords.  This solution would also improve the overall accuracy of search results.  Apparently this idea has been floated several times, but never caught on.

I really like limiting keywords to 10-15 words. If you can't get your message across in ten words there is something wrong.

I really like limiting keywords to 10-15 words. If you can't get your message across in ten words there is something wrong.

Since two years I rank my keywords in order of relevance. Any site can cut them off where they like, 5, 10, 15 or whatever, I'm still sure the most relevant ones will stay. It would be great if the search engines took this relevance-ranking into account, but only CanStockPhoto and Fotolia do it.

To make ranking fast, I wrote a script tool for it.

Quote from: FlemishDreams on December 07, 2008, 19:21

Quote from: tsmarkley on December 07, 2008, 18:51

I really like limiting keywords to 10-15 words. If you can't get your message across in ten words there is something wrong.

Since two years I rank my keywords in order of relevance. Any site can cut them off where they like, 5, 10, 15 or whatever, I'm still sure the most relevant ones will stay. It would be great if the search engines took this relevance-ranking into account, but only CanStockPhoto and Fotolia do it.

To make ranking fast, I wrote a script tool for it.

Can you me more careful when you post links on this forum.When i clicked on your link.. my pc froze and could not even shut in down and had to turn the power of at the mains which as you no aint good for a pc.

There is nothing wrong with his link. It must be your computer. Don't be so quick to attack him.

Neither have I.

I think the most effective solution would be weighted keywords--each contributor gets a certain number of "points" per image, and assigns a certain number of those points to each keyword.  The more points, the earlier the image shows up in search results for that specific keyword.  A would-be spammer would be wasting his points on irrelevant or peripheral keywords and reducing the number of points he has to "spend" on other, more relevant keywords.  This solution would also improve the overall accuracy of search results.  Apparently this idea has been floated several times, but never caught on.

Yep, that's a good suggestion, same idea as the one I floated where you get exactly 50 keyword, but you can repeat the same word as many times as you like, which would give it a higher rating.
An algorithm more like Alamy's would be good too, where an image will rank higher in a search if it has been viewed or downloaded as a result of the same or similar searches in the past.

Shank

If you'd read what the window said - assuming it's the same one I got - you would have realised that it was warning that importing the standard thesaurus would take some time and IE would pop up a warning about it being slow.

As it said, quote: "just be patient and continue".

There is nothing wrong with the link.

Also, although going through a router is good, it doesn't mean a software firewall is not useful too.  I'd advise both.