Handling spam : Blocking users in Orkut

Does the image above look like your scrap book each morning you open it. Do these messages irratate you and only waste your time as you have to patiently delete each one and every time you delete one there just seem to be more that come.

Ever thought of blocking the user that is sending the spam. After a little bit of digging around this is how Orkut expects you to do it. Below is a descriptive screen shot of how to block and unblock users. First you have to go to the profile of the user that you wish to ignore and then move your mouse over the more>> link and thats when you are presented the option.Let us say that you have accidently ignored a user (would be so hard to do given how complex the task is) then the screen shot below shows how you can un-ignore that user.

Blocking users is so badly implemented.
First of all the help link is hard to find. In case you'll have not noticed it - the help link is present at the bottom right in the middle of the screen. Once you go into the help there is no link on the main help page giving you ideas about what to do with spam and junk messages. Being in the age of spam I would have expected this to be a topic of interest for Orkut.

On searching for spam I am presented with this long winded article about how Orkut is commited to fighting spam and right at the bottom of it you find the following "You can also report individual spammy scraps by checking the box next to the unwanted scrap and clicking the report spam button. The scrap will be immediately removed from your scrapbook and the orkut team will investigate the report. " Notice that it does not say anything about adding the user to the ignore list and I checked that it does not. Even if you do report someone for abusing the form that you have to fill up is like filling up a complete legal document.

Coming to the actual process of blocking a user I am not sure why Orkut has made it so hard to do especially when there are easier ways to do it like adding a button under delete called spam. The funny thing is that they have a delete button at the side of each message and a Delete Selected Scraps at the top of the table containing the scraps. But they don't have a spam button at the side of each message but they have a Report Spam on top.

All of this clearly shows that orkut has not put thought into how they want to handle spam and I think this is a serious problem as the number of spammers has grown considerably.