Yald Patrick Grote's Blog

Crunchbase has a spam problem

TechCrunch is great and their resource of CrunchBase is a great way to follow the life of a Web 2.0 company. Mike Arrington really found a great way of tracking these things. I've noticed lately that some of the companies are gathering spam as part of the user review process.

The user review process of CrunchBase allows people to enter their own thoughts of the services listed. It's an attempt to capture user generated content that is helpful to other people. While the Crunchbase spam problem hasn't moved to cesspool level yet, it has become more and more aggressive.

I've notice as I work through the list of companies that the consumer based services seem to get the most spam. For instance, Meebo is a fantastic web based IM service, but for some reason people like to spam the Meebo entry:

I also found spam in the entries of Flickr, Freewebs, Suicide Girls and Twitter. Some of the spam is just miscellaneous comments people add, but some of time it makes no sense, such as the SmugMug entry:

Now, I don't know why people do this. If you modify the CSS to show the NoFollow tags, you'll see that the URLs entered by people are tagged with NoFollow.

I do find it funny that CrunchBase, which appears to be a developed product, doesn't have an effective way to stop spam.

Related posts:

1. Meebo Crunchbase spam screenshot
2. Smugmug Crunchbase spam screenshot
3. How to fight image spam in your email
4. Getting paid to blog – two programs and how you’ll know
5. Google pagerank problem and communication issues