One big issue I had last year is that I was thrown out of adsense for my cocktail site because of rude content. It turns out a lot of cocktails have rude names. As far as adsense is concerned “Sex On The Beach” is ok but some cocktail names are really not ok. That makes sense and I can understand advertisers not wanting to appear next to rude content. The issue for me is I have 10k user submitted cocktails and I am 5k behind in terms of reviewing and rating them.
In order to solve this I defined all new cocktails as “rude” (rudenessid == 3 in my database) and then added a section at the top of each new cocktail asking users to review them. Then once a week I send myself a summary of the “unacceptable” and “rude” cocktails via email for me to go in and clean them up.
The below gives an idea of how much data and how many reports are flooding in to help me fix this :)
Users are super helpful and I have found overall that the crowd comes up with great accuracy each week. Especially when one of my facebook connected users review the content I can really trust user feedback on this front. I am still tuning the system but suddenly users are reviewing more cocktails each week than I have added AND the reviews concentrate in on the cocktails that are getting the most traffic. This really helps me keep the site clean in a crowd sourced manner. My friend Javi has an expression “work to not work” and this is a great example (in my opinion) of that!
mate I remain super impressed by the stuff you do. I have so far still to go. This pesky job thing keeps getting in the way :) That being said I do love my job :)
Posted by: alexschultz | February 13, 2011 at 02:54 PM
Loving "work to not work" - makes sense to do as little as possible to achieve the desired result rather than just keeping yourself busy to feel productive.
On BusSongs, I previously had all comments go through a moderation queue. I've now changed it to so that comments are passed through a filter (profanity, regex on long words/repeat characters/etc) and then are automatically published. Another update is coming this week so that users can flag bad comments and these are then sent into a review queue. Good idea on using FB/user profiling to try and rank the worthiness of a review. Could get smart with rewarding/punishing people based on the accuracy of their reports and then using that to rank new reports in the future - but I suspect that's overkill for a site of our scale.
Posted by: Kmander | February 13, 2011 at 02:38 PM