Flooders and fake profiles: As with any online social networking community, a number of fake and cloned profiles exist on Orkut.Due to the large number of users, and the deactivation of the jail system, the profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated easily. These profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It isn't hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds. Also, many of the users use these profiles to steal art that has previously posted online and deem it their own.
In 2005 invisible profiles, communities and topics started to appear in Orkut. This could be achieved by using HTML escaping codes and 1x1 pixel photos to fool the engine behind the site.
In August 2005 a freeware program was made in Delphi called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything" - this was developed by a Brazilian) specifically for flooding Orkut. It quickly spread through the users and was easily downloadable (the most common Floodtudo versions were As this program was massively used by thousands of spammers, a big spam wave struck Orkut in September and October 2005. However, changes implemented by the developers in November made this program non-functional.
As the flooding of Orkut was becoming out of control, the developers implemented some features in order to stop this. These features included not allowing two or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted, forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry, and the usage of captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked. They gave more rights to community moderators as well, so that users can be banned outright instead of relying on the developers to remove them, and now community moderators are able to mass-delete topics selectively in forum as well.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: wikipedia.org
Friday, May 23, 2008
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