How to : The spam guard tweak

I got rid of 90% of my daily spam and bypassed comments* thanks to this trick!

If like me you don't like impersonal comments, chain mails and other annoying copy paste messages, you probably say in your shout box, you rant it in a blog, and you probably even turned off HTML in your comments!

As I did, you probably got very frustrated to find out that people didn't even read your page prior to sending me their comments, and are just keeping sending them to you everyday until you remove or block them.

At first, I attempted to send back a friendly note to each sender to tell him (as politely as possible) about how I didn't appreciate the copy paste comments, but I didn't have a great success, so where not even reading my message and I was just loosing my time.

Read this article to find out all the details about this tweak, and how you can apply it to your profile and get rid of the annoying comments practically overnight.

* A bypassed comment / message is when a user access you using the friends list or online friends shortcut and display directly to comment or message page without passing by your page. This is considered a bad practice as it doesn't give a page view to the recipient, and it's usually used by a lot of people who send you copy paste messages.

Part I : The comments section

• Go to control panel-blogs and add a new entry named "Comments"
• Ctrl+clic on your control panel to open in a new tab, then edit profile->layout->content, and remove the comments section
  
• Now edit your shout box, and add this HTML at the end of it.

 
Comments      
 


   View my comments | Leave me a comment
 

• Go to your new comments page (in the other tab), select the url from the adress bar, copy it, come back to your shout box and paste it in the first href attribute
• Go back to your new comments page, right click on the "leave comment" link, copy the link location, come back to your shout box and paste it in the second href attribute
• Eventually you copy paste the HTML of a few of your latest nicest comments below this code to make it more real and more user friendly. For this you just have to go to your page, right click, display the source code of your page, lookup the comments table, and paste a part of it in your shout box.

From now on, you will get noticed for bypassed comments by a "you have a new comment" and for comments from people who read your page and are using this link, you will get a "you have a new blog comment".

Part 2 : The mail box

• Go to your page, display the source code, select the user options table and copy it (from to )
  
• Go to control panel->edit profile->content, and remove the user options
• Go to your interests, and paste the table in the first section.
• Then Ctrl+click on control panel->blogs, create a new entry called "Mailbox", make it private, save it live and view it.
• Right click on the "leave comment" link, copy the link location, come back to your shout box and paste it in the href attribute of the "send message" link.

From now on, you will be noticed for new messages sent using a shortcut by a "you have new messages" and for messages sent using this link by a "you have new blog comments", and theses comments are like private messages since they are on a private blog, only you can see them.

This has also a big influence on your page views, since people will more easily click your picture to comment back instead of using the reply button that doesn't give a page view.

Part 3 : The wall of Lame

Unfortunately, some users are childish enough to justify such a lame method, but hey, it works and that's what really count in the end isn't it?

• Go to control panel->blog, and create an entry "Wall of Lame", where you write your favorite rant against spammers, a couple of warning notices to them, and a message to your friend saying to remove / block them or just throw them something, using a comment, like a rotten tomato pic for example .
• Then every time you receive an annoying comment, you send back your notice about how bypassing is a bad practice and how you love personal comments from people who really visit your page.
  
• Be careful to make your notices most polite, humorous and unoffensive, we're just talking about childishness here, it's not a big deal and some users are very sensitive and hurt when they receive such notice while they were just having fun fooling around with pic comments. Many people are new to this universe and it's important not to hurt anyone's feelings just because he's been a bit foolish. Always notice the user a couple of times before you glue him to your wall, many don't deserve it.
  

From now on, most users will come back to you, apologize and start really visiting your page or just stop sending you the stupid comments.

Update!

Apparently, the wall of Lame idea doesn't please Yuwie who dislike people actively fighting spam. My profile got locked up because the wall was violating their TOS.

This is kind of hypocrite, since the TOS forbid spam and Yuwie doesn't enforce their own TOS but hey, what kind you do ? Sue them ? Lol, this is just a game after all.

So if you want to keep your account alive, avoid naming the spammers, since they are under Y protection... You have been told, sorry about this ;)

Thanks to this method, I eliminated the huge majority of this spam and bypassed comments or messages, and what's left require very little time to get sorted out, plus I suspect many of my friends who where using the shortcuts not in a mean way but just to save time are now more used to follow my page links since they know I'm watching, so my profile views have seriously increased (about a 100% on the second day, hope it's not only the excitation of this new Yuwie trick)

So you got my point, I highly recommand using this tweak on your own profile and I bet that Yuwie is going to turn in a much more friendly place extremely soon, for the benefit of everyone (more friendly=more referrals)