Spam and the Spammy Spammers who Spam Us

Sigh.

We've spent the last few days battling spammers who are using hundreds of IP addresses to post links to spammy employment, hosting, and pill websites.

These folks are trying to break the Internet. Our small but scrappy team is circling the wagons in attempt to keep our little corner of the web in the Light.

Sadly, today we had to pull the nuclear option on the country of India. Users with IP addresses originating in India will no longer be able to access RateItAll until we can get the spam agencies off our backs.

To friends of RateItAll in India, we hope this is a temporary measure. And we apologize for such drastic measures - we just don't have the resources to continue to fight these spam shops.

And truth be told, it appears that these spam agencies have at least two US companies funding them. We are in the process of seeing what our legal options are for going after the purse strings.

Building out our Art Section

We're experimenting with a new tool that let's create lists on the fly of pretty much any topic. We're trying it out by building some lists of some of the greatest works by the greatest artists - some of the descriptions might look a little screwy, but the images of the art should be accurate.

Check it out:

Degas Paintings
Kahlo Paintings
Da Vinci Paintings
Rivera Paintings
Van Gogh Paintings

I also used the tool to build out a list of Mexican Presidents - and took a bit more care with the descriptions.

How to Add a Photo to a Review

We are starting to see more and more photos added to reviews. Photos can be particularly helpful for things like restaurant reviews, travel reviews, and even, beverage reviews.

So how do you drop a photo into a review? There are a couple of ways.

1) Far and away the easiest way is to use our emailed reviews feature. Just look for the "email your review" link on any item page, and attach the image to the email:


One note on this: make sure that you are sending the email from the same email address that is linked to your RateItAll account. If you send it from a different email address, a new RateItAll account will be created.

2) You can use image hosting services like Flickr, ImageShack, or PhotoBucket. Upload your photo to one of those services, and look for the embed code option (similar to embedding a YouTube video).

We will likely be looking at more ways to include photos in reviews. It seems like this might be something that would be handy from a mobile device as well.

Please Welcome our Fabulous New Interns

All, please take a second and say hi to RateItAll's amazing and talented new interns: Barbara, Yulia, and Nicholas.

They will be helping us get the site ready for the Holiday shopping season, as well as working on our new mobile project (details coming).

List Your Business / Product / Site on RateItAll

This month, nearly 1.4M people will visit RateItAll.com and many, many more will see RateItAll reviews on other sites.

Putting your product / business / site / blog on RIA is a great way to get more exposure, and to get folks talking about your product.

Listing is free - just use this link.

Here are a few things you get access to by listing your stuff on RateItAll:

You get editorial control over the description, links, and images on the page (alas, not the reviews).

You get access to our cool ratings / testimonials widget for your site. This lets people read and write reviews of your biz / product without having to leave your site. It looks like this:



You get access to the "Loved on RateItAll" seal / badge. It looks like this:



You get access to our really cool emailed reviews feature, and an email address just for your business. Try it out by emailing a review of RateItAll.

You also get things like email alerts of new reviews of your business, commenting tools, and RSS feeds for your business' reviews.

The price for all of this is $0.00. We think it's a pretty good deal. Click through to get listed.

Getting More Votes into the System

One of the things we are looking at right now is how to get more votes (helpful / funny / agree) into the system. Currently, voting on a review is a multiple click process. One click to open the voting box, and then more depending on how you are voting. We are going to try and make this simpler.

The second piece of this is looking at how we might expand the universe of people able to vote on the helpfulness of a review.

As a fairly prolific RIA reviewers, I know I enjoy getting votes and comments on my reviews. Making this feature easier and available to more people should help me (and everyone else) get more votes.

So what are we working on these days?

It's been a while since we've posted on the blog, and I wanted to check in and let folks know what we've been working on:

• Revenue. Yes, we have to pay the bills. The biggest thing we've added recently is pricing information on all of our product pages. You'll notice on any product page, you will now see the best prices from various merchants, as well as pictures of the product. For example, check out the prices on the iPod Touch Reviews page.
• Adding Stuff to the Site. Typically, the holiday shopping season is a very important time for RIA, and it's crucial that we have coverage for what people are shopping for. One of the sections that's grown the most recently is our Home & Garden reviews section - take a peek to see the kinds of things we've been adding to the site.
• Mobile. We are working on some VERY cool stuff around accessing RIA from your cell phone. Stay tuned.

Finally, we've started to work on getting the Longtail content out of the main river. Our friends at Longtail have an extremely popular video player, which sometimes has a RateItAll ratings plugin attached to it. Everytime someone rates a video, that rating shows up in the main "everyone" river. Our rating plugin is on something like 400K sites, meaning there is a tremendous amount of Longtail activity on the site - way more than we expected. We're working on ways to make this high volume activity, uh, less visible to visitors to RateItAll.com.

That's it for now. We have more good stuff in the pipeline... stay tuned.