With the use of social bookmarking sites as a means of promotion, Delicious have been facing a lot of spam problem lately. Their goal of a community sharing the best websites on the internet turned to spamville overnight. People have been submitting links expecting the popular link juice.

With this, Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, announced last 2007 in the SMX Conference that they are going to implement in the nofollow tag. This is to prevent people from submitting irrelevant links just for link juice. This may have stopped some from submitting spam links but it did not stopped all.

So now Delicious have resorted to another way of solving the problem and that is through silent bans. For those people who do not know what ’silent bans’ mean, it is a way of banning by not notifying the person and rendering that person’s activity irrelevant to the system. This is what Brent Csutoras experienced which he shared on his blog on a post entitled “When Did Delicious Starts Silent Bans?“. According to his post, he saw his past bookmarks disappearing from the system as his new bookmarks are rejected. Here is how he relays his story.

Last week while I was attempting to bookmark a page, I noticed that my saved page did not show up in Delicious, outside of my personal bookmarks page. So if you were to look at the bookmark through Delicious, you would not see that I had saved it at all.

I have no idea how long this has been going on, as it appears that once you’re ’silent banned’ it removes all your previous activities from the system.

Brent Csutoras claimed that this is a rather familiar situation. It was not so long ago when Reddit did the same thing. A person who is silent banned submit a particular story to the websites but then the website does not react. It will not submit the story rendering the account of the person useless.

But one question comes to mind with all these things happening. Why do social bookmarking websites such as Reddit and Delicious have to resort to these informal ways of banning? Why do they keep the account but leave the user useless to the community?

Also, as Brent Csutoras wondered, what triggers the penalty? How can he, who rarely use his Delicious account get banned by Delicious?

I guess these are some questions that Delicious must answer in the next conference they are going to attend.

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Yahoo have decided to shut down MyWeb starting March 18, 2009. Known as a social bookmarking site, MyWeb has allowed its users to save, share and discover bookmarks. However, the existence of other applications such as Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious have rendered MyWeb useless.

It is with this reason that Yahoo decided to shut down the application. After all, why keep an application if it does the same service. It is true that it may be a significant social bookmarking area. It may even contribute an extra backlink for SEOs. But MyWeb is not really a popular bookmarking site to begin with. Yahoo took this into consideration as they track the traffic from the three applications: MyWeb, Yahoo Bookmarks and Delicious.

On the bright side, a lot of improvements can be expected from Yahoo who promises to devote their time to Delicious this 2009. There will also be a clear distinction between Delicious and Yahoo Bookmarks from now on because Delicious will be taking care of public bookmarks while Yahoo Bookmarks will be taking care of the private. There will also be an export option available so users can quickly ship their bookmarks to different sites in a snap.

There are also some good news for the current MyWeb users. First, they do not need to worry about their bookmarks being lost. Yahoo decided to stash them away in Yahoo Bookmarks. So the links will still be intact. Second, their bookmark button and badge can be easily substituted by Delicious. And third, Yahoo have provided a feedback page for MyWeb users who will encounter problem during the move.

Yahoo MyWeb was launched back in 2005 with the goal of helping its users discover new links. With no significant increase in users, the application will be shut down even if it is just on Beta stage.

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