We have all seen spam comments on YouTube vidoes, comments that detail how you can make thousands of dollars from the comfort of your sofa and what not. Recently, Google released an entirely new comments system for YouTube, one that requires users to have a Google+ account. The system was criticized by the co-founder of YouTube as well as the general public, how have rallied together and garnered over 200,000 petitions on an online signature urging Google to revert back to the old system. While Google said that the new system would handle spam better, it actually opened up a couple of new ways for spammers to comment on videos.
The older system didn’t allow users to post comments that included clickable links, but the new system reverses that restriction. Thus spammers took advantage of this which led to some YouTube publishers disabling the new comments system entirely. Some commenters are also using ASCII text and leaving picture comments, which this might not be considered as spam, it isn’t exactly the high quality feedback that Google promised with the new system. In a new blog post, Google details some of the changes it has made to tackle the spam problem. There’s now better recognition of bad links and attempts at impersonation, improved detection of ASCII images and even changes to how long comments are displayed. The company also says that it is working on improving comment ranking and that tools for bulk moderation of comments will be released soon.