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Keeping It Real
We are living in a world where social media has become more of a daily facet of our lives. There has been a sharp rise on social media in fake accounts distributing spam, data mining, malware, and phishing attacks. This activity via social networks has increased dramatically between April and June 2011. These entities are increasingly using templates from social sites to make themselves and their messages appear legitimate. And rather than concentrating on quantity, they are working harder on targeting smaller groups of users.

Many network owners are employing various techniques to protect their users from activities involving fake accounts. Deciding whether a profile is or isn’t real isn’t quite as cut and dry as people would like to believe.

If you Google the words “automated sign ups on social networks” you’ll find companies that specialize in doing automated sign ups and others offering software that does the same thing. The newer generation bots are powered by automated scripts which gather a site's profile design. The bot can then automatically fill out profile fields using short commonly used phrases found from similar profiling forms. These bots can submit the form and register accounts without anyone having to actually be in front of a computer. The same routine can then be used to login, upload a profile image, make friend requests, post comments and send messages. With such methods it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish a bot from a human user. But there are a few things that characterize human users that we've come to recognize that we also take into consideration when approving new members.

We’re more proactive and prudent than most niche network owners in dealing with this. Mainly because we have our very own web server which allows us maximum control and more oversight, something that network creators using cheap shared servers and SaaS platforms such as Ning, Social Go and Snapp don’t have.

Here at PozVille every new sign up is reviewed before getting access to our site. If we’re not certain about someone we may give them limited access to some areas of the site or restrict the use of the messaging, friend request and commenting features. Email addresses and ISP connections are verified and checked to see if they appear on any of the major blacklists. We check to see where the connection is coming from - we only see the city or town, state and country, not the street or physical location. We also continually block proxy servers, domains and certain countries that are notorious for spam, scam and malicious activity. We do not retain abandoned and inactive accounts. If a member has not logged in for several months and does not respond to our pokes to do so or their email address bounces because they no longer use it we remove them from the site.

Our policies, methods and other controls to weed out the goats from the real people are not perfect, nothing ever is. But we do our best at being a good gate keeper. Ultimately the end result helps us maintain a pleasant online environment for everyone and achieve our goals.