Blog Your Way to OSCON

Naturally, this quality did come at the expense of some bumps along the way. Last week, the MyBlog system was flooded with spam content. While it was quickly removed as it appeared, it was enough of a problem that we are taking some steps to make sure such abuse does not continue.

Temporarily, we have made the blogs a moderated system. This was resisted on our part, because we wanted to keep the flow as open as possible. But, in order to stop the (mostly) overnight attacks, I decided to put the moderation gate in for now. Please note, I am only moderating for spam content–not opinions or subject matter. And again, this is temporary.

Ultimately, our development team will be putting a spam-removal system in where spam should not get through at all, and if it does, volunteer moderators will be able to remove it and block the offending spammer regardless of the time of day. This system will also be put in place for the direct messaging system and the forums, too.

Dealing with spammers is an unfortunate side-effect of working on the Internet today, and I hope you’ll “pardon our dust” as we work to perfect Linux.com.

As a way of saying thanks, and to celebrate the community blogs, we’d like to kick off a little competition. Recently, we became media partners for the ever-cool OSCON event, happening July 20-24, 2009 in San Jose, CA. As a media partner, we were graciously donated two free passes to the event (excluding the tutorials) to share with two Linux.com users.

So, here’s the scoop: starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT tonight (June 11) and for the rest of the month (11:59 p.m. EDT on June 30), the two community bloggers with the most total reads will each receive one of these passes to attend this year’s OSCON.(Travel and accommodations not included, sorry to say.)

Note, this is total reads, not total blogs, because we’re emphasizing quality, not quantity. You should have a few really great blog that capture a lot of reads each, versus a bazillion “Hello World” blogs. Be creative, be thoughtful. Get the conversations going. It might just get you in the door at OSCON.