onXiam - Development Blog

• Spam, Time, What Next...

  Kevin Poulsen

  January 21, 2009

  Hi everyone.  Long time, no talk.  I won't beat around the bush, here's what's on my mind:  

  
  

  1. My job is taking up much of my time, and in this economic environment, I want to focus on that as much as I possibly can.
     
  2. Spam is just...ridiculous.  I cannot keep up with it.  Every simple trick I try to implement is circumvented in a matter of days and I just don't have the time to implement anything more in-depth, or to clean up the mess that the spammers make all the time.
     
  3. I haven't had time or ambition to develop anything new for the site in ages, and I'm starting to think that it may have just run its course.
     

  When I started Onxiam, it was to fulfill a need that my mom had -- the need to keep up to date with me on various websites.  That need is not so big anymore, and in the days since I launched Onxiam, there have been many others who have done similar things with more time to focus on it.  Because of this, I'm thinking that it may be time for me to retire Onxiam.

  
  

  For now, I've tried once again to clean up the spam, and as a first measure, I've disabled the "add a site" feature.  I'm going to kick it around for a while before I decide whether or not to fully retire the site...but for now I'll leave it as-is, with the exception of not being able to add more sites.

  
  

  -Kevin
  

  
  
• Fighting the Ugly Spam Monster

  Kevin Poulsen

  February 14, 2008

  Greetings everyone.
  
  I know that I've been absent for a while, but truth be told, I have been working on a better version of the site. Work just goes much more slowly these days than it did in the past. I simply have my hands in too many cookie jars at the moment.
  
  However, work is progressing and I'm trying to be more diligent about getting this release finished, because I think that it is quite an improvement over the current site.
  
  Now onto the topic at hand: SPAM
  
  I hate it. You hate it. We all agree.
  
  I've tried to leave Onxiam very "open" -- most notably in allowing people to add sites to the collective pool. However, spammers have been adding far, far too many bogus sites to Onxiam. It's gotten to the point that I simply cannot keep up. One quick look through the site and you'll see what I mean. Who knew that there was such a thriving online community for "SONY Laptop battery 088XX-2135".
  
  I mean really, all of you Laptop Battery people...I just don't know what to say to you. You've just gone way, way too far. I've been struggling with the morality of "policing" Onxiam and deleting sites and deleting accounts. I don't want to spend my time censoring things, but I'm simply left with no other option at this point.
  
  Onxiam was conceived out of a need -- a need to group my online names in one place that would be easy for my friends and family to find. Other people found it useful too, and that's great! But it was always meant to be a list of online communities, not spam keywords.
  
  With that in mind, I am working on taking action to purge all of the sites and user accounts that have been deemed as spam.
  
  This will greatly clear up the noise in the Onxiam database, and will allow me to actually focus some effort on developing features when I get free time instead of spending all of my free time fighting spammers.
  
  Unfortunately, this also means that when I release the new version of the site, the "add a site" feature will be replaced with "request a site". This will allow me to catch spam upfront, before it floods the database and wreaks havoc all over Onxiam.
  
  I'm sorry everyone has had to deal with all of the laptop battery garbage. It will be gone soon.
  
  All the best,
  -Kevin
• Mention on the BBC site

  Kevin Poulsen

  June 29, 2007

  I think that a lot of the recent traffic here at Onxiam has to do with an article over on the BBC website. In the article titled The Tech Lab: Bradley Horrowitz, he mentions Onxiam about halfway down under the section titled Digital Lives.
  
  What Bradley is talking about is exactly why I first created Onxiam. And as I've mentioned before on this blog, no Onxiam is not a "secure" solution to this problem, but in the meantime until there is some kind of unique digital identifier, I (and my Mom) needed some way to keep all of these online names straight. And as it turned out, so do many other people.
  
  I just wanted to thank Bradley (elatable) publicly for mentioning Onxiam in the story! I've been getting a lot of traffic ever since, so thank you very much for the shoutout!
  
  -Kevin