Vocus PR is Killing Me

Originally uploaded by sogrady

“Imagine you are a PR practitioner who has been tasked by your company with the challenge of creating buzz in the blogo-sphere to promote a new product launch. So you create a list of bloggers who have written about your company’s industry and prepare your pitch, and make sure to add links to additional information that would help them write a story about your company’s new product. Within two hours of sending your e-mail, you see that five bloggers have picked up your story. You click on the first story and are horrified to see that the blogger has completely trashed your company for ‘spamming’ them. Clicking on the others, you see that most other bloggers have responded similarly, and several have even posted copies of your pitch e-mail, criticizing both you and your company. Within 24-hours, your attempt to reach out to the blogosphere has turned into an utter failure.

Does this situation seem uncommon? Guess again. Thousands of PR pros who have been successful getting their companies covered in traditional media have encountered numerous obstacles when dealing with bloggers.” – Five Golden Rules for Blogger Relations, Vocus (PDF link)

Irony, thy name is Vocus. For the very same company authoring the above is the same that has made PR pitches the bane of my existence. Nor am I the only one so unfortunately afflicted; other bloggers like Volker Weber and Friend of RedMonk Josh Hallett have previously explained, Vocus is the originator of a substantial volume of PR spam. For many of us.

Among the entities who’ve put me on their Vocus email blast list are the Emergency Medical Associates, U.S. India Business Alliance, Welsh Assembly Government and the pictured Drug Information Association. If you’re wondering what I – a software industry analyst – has to do with any of the above, well, that makes two of us. The truth is that I could care less about any of them. Nor am I particularly interested in hearing what’s up with Jobfox, the City of St Petersburg Florida, or The World Electronics Expo – others that have chosen to Vocus-spam me in recent weeks.

Just opt-out, you say? If only it were that simple. Vocus is careful to ensure that you can, in fact, opt-out. Presumably because they’d prefer not to be litigated. But of course you can only opt-out of the list that spammed you. They decline to provide any mechanism – that any of us can find, anyway – to opt out of Vocus entirely. So instead those of us at sea in Vocus spam are required to click a link at the bottom of each incoming mail and opt-out individually. Which is clearly less than scalable. Nor particularly effective; I’ve opted out of the Abderdeen Group’s missives at least twice, and still they find their way to my Inbox.

The simple fix to this problem would be to filter everything coming from Vocus period by either bouncing it or deleting it. But sadly, this is not at present an option, because there are a few RedMonk clients that use the service. And automagically deleting client email – even that intended as marketing – is, I’m told, not a terribly strong idea.

The question then is what to do?

Ideally, reputable companies would either decline to use Vocus and/or move away from them: at which point I could simply blacklist their mail and move on with my life. But that’s not likely to happen any time soon, so for those of you that have a.) suffered from the Vocus spam problem or b.) work in the PR industry, I’m open to any suggestions you might have.

Because the situation at present is untenable.

Please tell me why something got filtered. We nearly lost a customer this morning because an inbound request of theirs from earlier this week got rerouted to my Trash folder, and hence, ignored. I was very puzzled by an email that I did see, and the voicemail I got, until I talked to James and discovered that I’d completely missed the original thread. I’d have been pissed too.

Fortunately, all appears to be well as our client was gracious and forgiving, but if it happened once it can clearly happen again. Addressing the issue, however, is easier said than done. Because the emails were in the Trash folder rather than Junk, I can safely deduce that it’s not an overzealous Zimbra spam filter, but rather a custom rule that I’ve set up. These have been set up, in fact, because the Zimbra spam filter – or, perhaps, MACCIuS’ tuning of said filter – isn’t zealous enough.

I’ve created perhaps two dozen of these rules to handle the horde of junk mail we receive that isn’t caught by the anti-spam mechanisms. As it turns out, I’m not terribly interested in penny stocks, Rolexes, Viagra or any of the other items being peddled in such an offensive and debilitating fashion. One of these rules is clearly misbehaving, and intercepting mail that it shouldn’t be. But which one?

I just went through them again and I haven’t the foggiest. They all look fine to me – very specific, and the message headers don’t tell me why it was routed where it was. So the only sure answer would be to delete them all, every last one. But that’s not realistic; even with the two dozen rules active, I get at least a dozen or two spam messages daily. Without them, I’d be buried, and you’d never hear from me again (maybe that’d be a good thing . Damned if I do, damned if I don’t, then.

But it doesn’t have to be this way; all I’d need is a notification saying “Routed to Trash because of Rule X.” Then I could delete or correct the problem rule, and be on my way. Until then, however, I guess I’ll have to watch my Trash folder a bit more closely.

The point of this is not to indict Zimbra, as I’ve had similar issues with Exchange and Gmail in the past, but it’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Hopefully before I lose a customer.

One of the other things most people don’t know about me is that I have a minor obsession with plagues. Stemming from my background in European history, I’ve had a morbid fascination with both the epidemiological and societal aspects of pandemic agents for quite some time. As a result, I read a lot of weird books like “In the Wake of the Plague” (so-so), “The Great Influenza” (excellent, if a little melodramatic at times), “The Coming Plague” (a friend of mine’s Dad is included for his discovery of Toxic Shock syndrome), and yes, a couple of plague oriented blogs (conveniently grouped under the “plaguefeeds” tag).

If you’ve studied the subject, pandemics are typically triggered by a change of some sort that makes an existing virus or bacterium more communicable, more lethal, or both. This is the fear that many have with respect to the Avian Flu; the influenza virus that causes it, H5N1, has elevated mortality rates but fortunately for us has yet to be able to infect human hosts as easily as some of its influenza cousins. If H5N1 is able to swap some of the sugars that coat the virus with those from human infecting flu strains, it’s possible – even likely – that we’d be facing an outbreak, a pandemic.

What’s becoming apparent to me, through a variety of channels, is that we appear to be poised for a similarly debilitating and difficult to combat outbreak of spam.

As you’re all far too aware, we at RedMonk have struggled with absurd volumes of spam over the past year, and the frequency and severity of attacks is only increasing. What was once merely a nuisance is becoming a legitimate threat to our business. On at least a half dozen occasions, the spam attacks have been sufficiently high volume to paralyze Apache. To put that in context, we run on a box that under normal circumstances would be hosting hundreds, perhaps thousands, of sites. And yet spammers are able to bring our few properties to a grinding halt because their attempts to spam us become, effectively, distributed denial of service attacks.

It would be one thing if we were an isolated case, but we’re clearly not. David’s site, hosted by Cape.com, had its commenting facility knocked offline by persistent high volume spam attacks. And Alex’s web presence, meanwhile, has been bouncing up and down under similar assaults. His load is so obscene that even removing or renaming the file in question doesn’t remedy the situation: the attackers continue requesting the missing file at such high volumes that Apache cannot help but buckle under the load.

I’ve got virtually no experience with networking at the ISP and/or backbone level, so I couldn’t begin to comment on what the potential solutions for this problem are. But I do believe that the loads are growing aggressive enough that it’s just a matter of time until it’s an ISP level problem. There’s only so much you can ask Akismet, Bad Behavior, et al to do, after all.

Like the common cold, spam would appear to be one of those afflictions that will be with us more or less forever. It’s killing Om, bugging Tim, driving Edward crazy, and is more or less the bane of my own existence these days.

The most common manifestation of the problem, of course, is email. Anyone who has an inbox has encountered it, and while some filtering services are better than others, none are perfect. Even Gmail, which many of the folks I know have begun to proxy their mail through as an ad-hoc filter, is beginning to fail beneath the relentless inventiveness of those pushing penny stocks and other useless crap. Our own email system, Zimbra, is likewise showing its cracks; every morning when I wake up, I’m greeted by one to two dozen unwelcome items. And despite dutifully marking these as Junk, the filters do not appear to be learning particularly well – forcing me to create filter after filter in an attempt to handle what the built in Junk filters miss. The client-side options available, were I inclined to use them, are not that much more impressive.

Unfortunately, spammers have not limited their attention to email systems. Our migration away from Movable Type to WordPress, in fact, became necessary in part because of MT’s increasing inability to handle the greater and greater volumes of spam we’re seeing. What kind of volumes? Well, as discussed before, the volume of traffic coming through our Apache instance on a monthly basis is always north of a million pageviews, and occasionally over 2. While I like to think we’re popular, we’re not that popular. Some of that’s wiki spam, some of that’s blog spam, some of that’s referrer spam, but precisely none of it is welcome.

Given the success of technologies such as Automattic’s Akismet service, I think some of the “spam will kill the web” doomcrying you’ll hear is overblown. Do I lose significant portions of every day and every week dealing with the problem? Yes. But I can still work, and conduct business effectively via the channels mentioned above. But when better than 9 of every 10 emails is spam, it’s time to acknowledge the severity of the problem. The scope of the problem is more obvious every day, and is a good indication that the scope of the solution may need to be similarly comprehensive.

I’m not nearly good enough to have a solution to the spam pandemic, but I know where I’d start looking for ideas: Akismet and Google. They’re not perfect, but they’re better than most.

Spam Count for November

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

On November 6th, I cleaned out our Movable Type junk folder. I’d emptied it previously the 28th of October. In that week+, we accumulated 126,598 spammed comments. Because of travel and my WordPress migration, I hadn’t been paying a whole lot of attention to cleaning it up. But checking quickly a few minutes ago, I got this number: 486,193. That’s with me having migrated a week ago and with a shutoff of comments for the RedMonk Blog.

It’s not all Movable Type’s fault, of course, but my experience thus far on WordPress leads me to believe that our experience once migrated will be significantly improved.

Now if only I could get back all the time I’ve spent dealing with the problem.

P.S. And speaking of spam, that’s one of my only significant complaints with Zimbra thus far. But more on that later.

Yo, Technorati, Got a Bit of a Problem Here

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

Could you let them know that they’ve got a bit of a bug with their syndicated search feeds? Well, I presume they do, as the normal on site search returns non-duplicated results.

For some reason, however, for the past several weeks my vanity search for “tecosystems” in Technorati has been positively overrun with duplicates. Pictured here are multiple repetitive links to Catherine Helzerman’s interview with James – which is excellent and highly worth reading, but not something I need to be reminded of a dozen times per day – but Bob Sutor’s del.icio.us’ links from 10-26-06 have received the same obsessive treatment in the past.

So if you know the folks at Technorati, would much appreciate the passing along of this message. If you think that it’s a non-Technorati problem, on the other hand, I’m all ears.

Thanks much in advance.

This is Getting Out of Hand

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

Since emptying our Junk folder less than two days ago, we’ve received another 25,000 spam comments. It’s getting unmanageable. We’re regularly bleeding dozens of these things into the Good folder now, where that used to be an anomalous event.

I don’t know if WordPress will solve this problem or not, but I can’t see how it would be materially worse. We need to do something because the volume is getting completely out of hand.

Guess I need to fast track a loading of a local instance of WordPress and look at how it handles the MT database import. Maybe on the plane tomorrow.

Movable Type Under Attack

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

As regular readers of the RedMonk IT Report are aware, we’ve been a Movable Type shop almost since day 1. I say almost because our blog used to be published by a very basic ASP based content management system, back in those halcyon days when I hand rolled our RSS feed (you read that right – I used to escape out all the punctuation – by hand). Put differently, we’ve been on Movable Type for several years now and for the most part have been happy customers. The commercial support, in particular, has been useful more often than not, and has more than justified the investment.

But all the while, I’ve been surreptitiously coveting the Firefox-like volume of plugins and themes that WordPress boasts, and thinking, “Well, if I had that plugin I could do X,” or, “Wow that’s a cool theme.” It’s not that MT doesn’t have a plugin architecture – it does, and we use several (including one plugin ported from WordPress, Akismet). Nor that it doesn’t have nice available themes – this, which I recently discovered – has some very attractive styles to pick from.

It’s just that the evidence at hand tells me that WordPress has done a better job than MT of fostering a vibrant and sizable community. I’ll leave the discussion for why that might be until later, but it’s self-evident to me.

That alone hasn’t proven to be quite enough to push us off MT, however, given the difficulty of migration. Or more specifically, one aspect of migration – the preservation of our existing URL structure. I have no intention whatsoever of jeopardizing the often impressive search rankings that our blogs have achieved through no real optimization efforts on our part, so with the migration from one platform to another (easy) comes the need to repoint the several thousand posts we’ve generated to date (less easy).

Seeing what Alex is building with his revamp of alexking.org, however, made me think it’d all be worth it. But it was watching MT lumber through another sustained spam attack last night around midnight – with me ineffectually dropping random IP’s into a deny statement within our .htaccess file – that I finally broke down.

I’m tired of fighting MT; we’ll be cutting over to WordPress as soon as it can be arranged. Timeline is to be determined by how long it takes me to figure out an appropriate URI redirection strategy (how I wish I had a network offering to connect me to someone who’s done this before and wants to be paid for it). You can probably expect a lot of changes from the move, and I’ll try to keep you all posted well in advance.

RedMonk September Statistics

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

I was perusing through our statistics this morning while waiting for a CD to finish burning, when I noticed something strange. Really strange. RedMonk, as we’ve mentioned before, typically does something in the neighborhood of 300K pageviews a month now. Our stratospheric growth (you don’t want to know where we started from stalled just a bit over the summer months, picking up single rather than double digit thousands of new impressions per month, but the growth was still there. We’re pretty happy with the way things have been going.

What all of the above means is that, on any given day, redmonk.com is liable to be hit about ten thousand times. This includes visitors to our blogs, visitors to our site, and, of course, spammers of both the comment and referrer variety (notably, it omits those picking up our feeds from Feedburner, where the vast majority of our readers are directed). But when I looked at the September numbers, they were up. Improbably up. In fact, as of the last week or two we’re doing more traffic in three days than we previously could have anticipated in a month. Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation, we’re in line for something like 1.8M visitors this month.

Sounds good, right? Huge spike in interest? Not exactly. Certain channels directing folks to RedMonk have indeed picked up, possibly as summer comes to an end and folks return from vacation, with the most noticable example of this being Google. But the primary target of all of this new attention seems not to be our blogs, or our homepage, but our wiki. Now to be clear, I like our wiki, and think it does have some good content: our COA, howto’s for reading and writing blogs, etc. But do I think it’s reasonable to expect that it would receive nearly a million hits in about two weeks? Not so much.

Throw in the fact that the most popular individual page on the wiki seems to be my Bloglines howto, registering in at 1238 impressions as of this moment, and it seems pretty clear that something is up. Something, most likely, of a spamming nature. Unfortunately, the stats package supplied by 1and1 is not sufficiently fine grained to determine the source of this new traffic, nor do I have Statcounter installed on the wiki (yet).

So at this point it’s nothing more than a curious anomaly, and not one that’s costing us money (yet). But before things get worse, I’m wondering if any of you have any particular stats package that you can recommend – preferably one that’s free – so that I can figure out just who likes our wiki to the tune of a million hits a month.

If I See This One More Time…

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

As I explained it to one audience yesterday, I consider services like PubSub and Technorati’s Watchlists to be the rough blogging equivalent of Google’s News Alerts. One scans blogs, the other news, but same principle. They watch a channel for mentions of a keyword or link.

In concept, it’s a terrific idea. In execution, it’s mostly still a terrific idea. But lately, it’s less terrific. Much less.

PubSub, of the available services, has been for me the least prone to duplicate mentions – i.e. false-positive returns that come back again and again. But since the Adobe/Macromedia news, PubSub has taken to showing me the pictured Industry Standard story featuring a quote from my esteemed colleague several times per day, often with multiple mentions in the same return. Each and every day, I’m treated to that same article somewhere between 5 and 10 times. It’s driving me crazy, to the point that I’m considering dropping that particular watchlist.

So while I don’t know if Tim is right, and Atom’s the answer to this particular problem, I do know that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. Because I’m certainly not the only one with such a problem. Please guys, kill the dupes.