Watshit

If you feel a user is exploiting Digg in some way, please report them by shooting Digg an email at abuse@digg.com.

It is a well known fact that social bookmarking networks have been an increasingly popular target for blackhatters, Digg is one of these networks being exploited time and time again.

The popular BlackHat blogger QuadsZilla had even blogged about DaveN’s blog on ‘messing with Digg’ . What this does is spark interest, and we’re not talking about the interest to get creative and constructive. A lot of people read these blog posts and think that if these guys are doing it, why shouldn’t they, which leads to the practice of going about getting Diggs the wrong way. The funny thing here is, you’re not only cheating Digg you’re cheating your loyal readers! By doing such acts, as creating a 301 redirect, you’re simple misleading your readers.

Now it seems that most of these sites have not read the obvious TOS;

with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services; - Digg

It has come to our attention that many users have opted to doing things the BlackHat way. They have gone and used a proxy server to register many, many times (In some cases as many as 150 times) and then go on to Digg’ing their own articles and such. Most are not smart enough to Digg other articles too and not log in and out of accounts using these fixed IP addresses while just Digg’ing their one article. Some do this over a certain period of time, and add friends using these different accounts so as to blend in nicely. Which in truth is simply deceiving. We would post a list of such user names involved in such acts but we’ll leave it to Digg to sort this issue out.

Another popular tactic that is being abused more and more is the Digg mine I’ll Digg yours communities popping up all over the place. Popular places such as Blog Catalog and the likes have communities up where people post each others articles to be Dugg by other members in return for an exchange of Digg requests.

We believe Digg.com provides us with a really useful service, whereby users go to read popular articles, well written ones and even interesting ones. By cheating your Digg count users are simply fooling us to read rubbish, pushing up their articles to the front page in order to get read is ridiculous and more should be done to stop them. Some of these users who practice such acts do so to sell a product, advertise a service, some just do it because they know how, if you suspect someone of tampering with their post count or asking to be part of a Digg exchange program for the sake of ranking higher, please report them today to abuse@digg.com