Will the Spam Engulf BlogRush?

BlogRush came out with a frenzy, and it did not take long to be realized that it is a huge target for spammers and people who want to game the system. From all forms of cheating like hiding the widget on pages, creating custom RSS feeds just to display on the widget, and generally just filling the system with spam blogs. I can’t say that I am surprised. When I signed up there was no check at all as to the content of my sites.

In a recent email there are two important things:

1. We’re moving to a MANUAL REVIEW process. No more automation. We will be reviewing ALL blogs submitted to BlogRush. If the quality of the blog is poor, they will not be allowed to participate. We’re going to start reviewing ALL the blogs that are currently in our network and will be disabling the accounts for poor quality blogs.

2. We’re continuing to add security measures to our system and we will be mass-removing any and all cheaters that we discover. We will not rest until the cheaters are WIPED OUT and kept from abusing our network. The manual review process will help eliminate most of them as legitimate bloggers that have put in the time to create a decent blog aren’t the types that are going to be abusing the system.

Will these changes come soon and fast enough to stop the spam from growing in the system, and will they be able to remove all of the spam that is already present?

That email came out on September 20th and as of the writing of this post the blog widgets that I have seen today have all contained some spammy headlines. Only time will tell if BlogRush is able to clean up things before bloggers start to abandon them.