New spam protection
If you’ve been watching the site the last few days, you have probably noticed that there have been a lot of spammers posting entries about either fitness programs or coronavirus protection.
At Open Diary, we have a constantly evolving strategy for dealing with spammers – that includes blocking certain words and phrases, blocking some geographic locations where spam originates from, and blocking internet hosts that support spammers. Unfortunately, with all of that together we have found there is still a lot of spam getting through and we are still spending a lot of time on staff deleting and blocking these users.
Today, we are happy to have launched a new layer of protection – we are now blocking any user who is a “free” user (meaning, they are trying the site on the 30-day free trial) from being able to post links in their entries. Nearly 100% of all spam entries that are posted are posted for the reason of sending people to another site – so removing the ability to post links should reduce those kinds of posts to nearly zero.
We will continue to monitor this situation, and will be very active in deleting any other spam that gets through, but we do think this will make the situation much better than it was.
Thanks everyone!
Trying to update my billing info but can’t tell if it updated
@kaliko hi, can you please send a message to Support through the link at the bottom of the page, and we can have a look. Thanks!
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I had no idea this site is only free for 30 days. Gutted! 😢 I had assumed it was free to use as it had been almost 20 years ago when I first started posting here. Sad that isn’t the case.
@ameribrit sorry that this comes as a surprise, but yes – when we re-launched OD it was the decision to make it a subscription site, to ensure that we would have the funds to continue upkeep on the site. There’s more information in this help article but if you have other questions please let us know. Thanks!
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Good Luck!
@dlk082244 thanks!
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AmeriBrit This is a much better situation than when the diary could be free. When they first started up again, right after the testing, they allowed others to come on free for 30 days. There were people on here that came only to harass others and to attack DM. They were very annoying to me and as soon as there time was up any that I was aware of vanished. Beside that we can’t expect not to pay for something like this.
@dlk082244 thanks for your support. Having a subscription has been key to controlling harassment of other members on the site – we are very proud to say we have had less than five ejections of members for harassing others, in almost three years!
In addition, we are very happy that we don’t have to sell data about our users (via advertising) in order to support the site – that was something we really didn’t want to do 🙂
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