If you've been following some of the postings here on this Blog as well as elsewhere on the blogosphere, you know there's been much discussion regarding 'acquaintance spam' and abusive use of the Plaxo service. Much of this abuse can be traced to the once-prominent Update Contact Wizard (UCW) feature. The UCW allows members to select individuals from their address book and send them an email asking for updated contact information.
Todd Masonis already wrote about some of the steps we are taking to prevent potential abuse. All of these changes are now in place. I believe the most significant change is the removal of the UCW from the new registration flow. Previously, when someone would join Plaxo, a new user was encouraged to update their address book by running the UCW. As a result, new users accounted for the vast majority of update request emails sent. Today, the UCW has been removed from the new user registration flow. New or existing users are no longer encouraged to run the UCW and the UCW button has been removed from the Plaxo Toolbar. Furthermore, newer Plaxo clients such as Thunderbird, Mac, and AIM do not include the UCW.
For members who may continue to run the UCW, perhaps because they have an older Plaxo Outlook client or they launch the UCW manually, we have also added additional service controls which limit the number of update requests a member can send. Additional throttling controls are also in the works, and we are actively moving away from using update request emails entirely. We hope and believe these changes will make a big difference, but we intend to remain vigilant in our efforts to eliminate any abusive use of the service. To that end, we would appreciate your help in the effort by reporting to us any inappropriate or suspicious use of the Plaxo service.
Reporting Abuse:
If you feel your privacy has been violated or that a member is abusing the Plaxo system, we ask for your assistance in reporting the abuse to our Plaxo Abuse Department (abuse @plaxo.com). We take every report of abuse very seriously, and each report is investigated and followed up on.
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Lee - I'm not sure which version of the client you are using, but you may want to make sure you've recently upgraded. There used to be a "reminder" feature within the Plaxo client, but that has long been removed. Thanks for the feedback.
Are there any other measures being put in place to prevent the 'spam' that is generated every time I edit my contact details? I hate this 'feature' that every time I make a change to my details, all my Plaxo contacts receive a notification from me informing them I've changed the details. This actually causes me to refrain from editing my details even when I want to. An easy solution to this would be for me to specify whether I want Plaxo members notified when I edit my details. Surely the whole point of Plaxo is to keep everything up to date, so why do I need to send out notifications to all of my contacts to tell them this?
Cheers - Stuart
That's a great question and a well made point. What you are referring to are the update notifications that are generated when a member's address book is automatically updated.
In our server release earlier this month (Apr '06), we introduced a change in the way update notifications are generated. The member who is updating their Plaxo cards now controls whether or not an update notification is generated along with their update!!!
When you change your cards, Plaxo will inform you that we will update the ABs of other connected Plaxo members automatically. You will also be asked if you would like to include a personalized notification along with your update. If you choose not to include a notification, the updates will still occur, but they will occur silently.
Unfortunately, as of today (Apr 26th), this change has only been rolled out to Plaxo Online. It currently only works when making changes to your cards through Plaxo Online. Most people make changes to their cards through the Plaxo Toolbar client
We are planning to upgrade the Plaxo Toolbar for Outlook/Outlook Express client in early May to include this fix as well. This will be client version 2.10 and existing members who wish to take advantage of this feature will need to manually upgrade to this latest client or make changes exclusively through Plaxo Online. Even if you don't manually upgrade your client, most clients should prompt to auto-upgrade within a few months after the release has been made available.
Brilliant - just tested it out and it worked perfectly!!
Thanks, I really enjoy the changes you guys have made with the service recently. Now if you can just implement my *small* feature request: http://forum.plaxo.com/showflat.php?Number=8684
Cheers - Stuart.
Glad to hear it worked for you. As for your feature request, you should be hearing some very exciting news shortly. Stay tuned.
Bravo!
I've never been one to get much UCW spam myself; I use Plaxo to manage my contacts across several computers, but most of my contacts don't use it, so it's never been a problem.
What *has* been a problem has been the almost-nagging of the client software, asking me to pester my friends for up-to-date info that I already know is correct.
Thanks for listening to the community on this :)