Well it was only a matter of time before the trolls, spammers and phishers started becoming a nuisance on Google Wave. Because Google Wave is in Preview and does not have all the complete features to deal with these folks (losers, a-holes, etc), users of Google Wave have taken things into their own hands and started a Wave called Google Wave User Black List. The opening blip describes the Wave as such:
If you see someone enter your public wave and he/she is on this blacklist, it is recommended to mark them as read only as soon as possible.
If someone destroys your wave or other waves please ping me and give me all the information, after I investigate it I will add them to the list. If you are unfairly being blacklisted, please ping me with as much information as you have and I will investigate and possibly remove you from the list.
The the Black List has the following users listed thus far:
NeWnAr: newnar2010@googlewave.com
Gaute Huus: isenzation@googlewave.com
Reason: Added a bunch of robots to a wave resulting in the wave being destroyed
Waves Destroyed: the ULTIMATE Wave GuideTom L: tomhasninelives@googlewave.com
Waves Destroyed: googlewave.com!w+pTIm2gTuX
GodKira : charanwilliams@googlewave.com
Waves destroyed (partly restored since): Emoticons – No Bot Needed The Awesome List Of Uses For Google Wave 2.5! See also : Troll attack shows Google Wave’s Vulnerabilities for more reported previous attacks.Recidivist guy – november 2009 troll attacks :
From http://thezargon.org/ : “A 12 year old, named Chris W., decided to start deleting content from as many as 7 waves, editing and counter-editing information inside blips and wavelets, in a live war watched by many”
See also : http://eliterate.posterous.com/ : “Over the past half hour – in a flurry of furious deleting, live-editing, dissappearing blips and random expletives – Google Wave met it’s first fully-fledged (well, fledgling, really – more on that later) troll.”El’Nara M. : anulia7921@googlewave.com
Wave destroyed : The Awesome List Of Uses For Google Wave 2.5!thewaveframe@googlewave.com
Simultaneous public waves attacks (including this wave) for a so called phishing-demo that certainly was a true phishing… Phishing Attempt in wave (gadget redirects browser to http:// hosting .gmodules…)
This Wave actually got the attention of Google Wave Developer Lars Rasmussen. He wrote to the folks in the Wave the following message:
Thanks all. I will alert our abuse team to this wave.
- Once you have added public with full access, making an abuse user read-only is more effective than removing them from the wave will be.
- We have begun testing remove participant internally and hopefully it will hit externally within a month
- There will soon be a way for you to report abuse directly to our internal abuse team
- The feature you are asking for: block a user from a particular wave and all future waves created by you is exactly right but it will take us many months to get there…
Andrew I was thinking we’d automatically make a special blacklist for each user, and automatically prevent anyone from my blacklist from contributing to waves I create. Should be as easy to add a particular user to your blacklist as it currently is to add them to your contacts.
I am not promising we will do this, but that’s the most favored design on my team.
Makes public waves a much less useful place. We are pretty short handed. Please have patience with us!
Lars Rasmussen
This type of direct response from the developer is so crucial to these types of problems and adds a level of comfort for all users knowing that this is top priority that the development team is working hard to address. Certainly will be interesting to see how they solve this problem. I think the blacklist idea is good but should probably be accompanied with a couple of levels. I.E. add to blacklist and report the user to Google for investigation and just add to your blacklist (i.e. you don’t like this person but they haven’t done anything nefarious).
Lars later added:
I know! Makes public waves in particular a much less useful place. We are pretty short handed on my team unfortunately, and have oh about a 1000 feature requests to deal with. Please have patience with us
Another very interesting comment made by ColorMyWaves.com was this excellent piece of advice:
Track Wave Vandals
Here is an example of how to track people who have vandalized or added unwanted Bot’s To your waves. Most of the time the wave tells you that someone has added a person or a bot but not all the times. Look for a pattern in the visitors list on top of the wave.
Example:
We are going to Follow this visitor (wikus.d9@googlewave.com) to see his or hers tracks through all the number of waves. To do this:
1). Just click on the (Public) in your contacts list then click on the (Group Waves) button.
2). After the (group:public@a.gwave.com) loads click behind (.com) add a space then add the person you want to track. Like so. (group:public@a.gwave.com wikus.d9@googlewave.com) Hit enter.
3). The list of all the waves this person has visited will appear .Now you can use the play back to watch the wave activities unfold. Or you can see if there is a pattern of bots added to the next person on the visitors list. Let’s look and see at our example. Here is only a few of the places this person has visited:
Christian Wave
This Embeded Wave has a company logo, colored font and a image for a background.
【Link-Easy 指令集討論區】指令名稱：info
Go in Google Wave
Cooperative Extension Wave DirectoryIf you noticed that everytime this person apears (wikus.d9@googlewave.com) this one is right behind (testgooglewave@googlegroups.com) and (testgooglewave@googlegroups.com) has a link attached to it just like (Public) dose. See the 3 blue dot’s?
Plus (wikus.d9@googlewave.com) has a link to (testgooglewave@googlegroups.com) in thier profile.
So with all that said you can now track people any where on google wave.
Excellent tutorial!
The unfortunate thing is that the time has come for this type of Wave. The good thing is that the Google Wave developer team is taking notice and acting on information provided in this Wave. Please, please, please take the time to add folks that need to be added to that Wave. For the time being it is really the only recourse we have to bring attention to those folks that take pleasure in destroying Waves for whatever stupid reason.
Have you had a Wave destroyed? What do you think of Lars’ comments?
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