Everything Booklikes & Leafmarks discussion
Booklikes - discussions
>
Do you think you will stick to using BookLikes?
date
newest »
newest »
message 51:
by
Susanna - Censored by GoodReads
(new)
Jan 31, 2014 10:00AM
Thank goodness, let's hope so.
reply
|
flag
I absolutely love Booklikes and can't see myself using GRs for anything other than their database, although BLs is growing that very quickly so doubt I'll need GR much longer. I currently do everything from BL and sync back to GR (just to keep it current).
I really like the blogging features of BL. Also, I'm getting to know people and seeing discussions about books/authors that I never engaged in on GR. That being said, because BL doesn't really have the same extensive cataloguing features as GR, I'll keep both platforms. I do long for some synchronization/link between the two tho.
I don't think I'll be using BookLikes much anymore, because I can't seem to do anything there without enabling a lot of info-gathering scripts. I can't even give a book a star rating.
willaful wrote: "I don't think I'll be using BookLikes much anymore, because I can't seem to do anything there without enabling a lot of info-gathering scripts. I can't even give a book a star rating."That's starting to really irritate me, too. And I am sick and tired of reporting and/or visiting and blocking the spam crap. I am going to explode the next time a Westhill, property group, management whatever anything follows me and runs a script.
I still honestly think booklikes is incredibly responsible in all other areas except the spam and the book database. And I do like how they do posts and shelf options.
I'm getting really impatient for a book database.
And, once again, I'll be spending the weekend cleaning out spam followers.
I would regret it if I got so frustrated with that that I quit booklikes before they got a database and I really was able to give them a try ... but, I'm tired of clearing spam every month. If I can bloody predeict what company names and key phrases are going to be spam issues, there's no reason they cannot when they can actually see which accounts posted the exact same thing and wipe out a thousand in a minute versus my 4 or 5 an hour.
I really love BLs. I was thinking about blogging in English for a while and than with the TOS change the perfect opportunity to do so came with BLs. Yes, you have to do some scripting first but there are a lot of templates to help you. Even someone who never did it before can be successful that way. The results are awesome and very colourful with all the different blogs. But the best is the friendly and kind atmosphere. I've met some great people over there I missed here. Last but not least the Bls staff is very obliging and most of the time super fast in reacting to requests or suggestions.
what do you mean about spam, D.A.? I haven't noticed anything.
Carol. [All cynic, all the time] wrote: "what do you mean about spam, D.A.? I haven't noticed anything."Neither me. I don't get any scripts, spam or anything at all. I was using Ad Block (because I use it on GR to shorten the UGB and to get rid of all the obnoxious advertising) but there wasn't any need. I do use Disconnect but that just blocks the tracking cookies.
My Dash is strictly friends, no advertising.
Nia (Kantorka) wrote: "I really love BLs. I was thinking about blogging in English for a while and than with the TOS change the perfect opportunity to do so came with BLs. Yes, you have to do some scripting first but the..."I didn't need to do any scripting, I just starred and blogged 'out of the box'. I later changed up the look of the blog but there wasn't any need to.
I haven't received any spam either, just updates from the people I'm following. Overall I'm very satisfied with Booklikes and will happily await their new book catalog.
Carol. [All cynic, all the time] wrote: "what do you mean about spam, D.A.? I haven't noticed anything."I'm not sure what she means by the scripting, but the spammers she's referring to would be listed as "following" you. If you look at your list of followers you may see names that have "Consulting Group" "Property Group", etc. in them, or I had a couple of lawyer firms listed on mine. These are spamming groups that have setup accounts on BL. They haven't actively spammed me yet but as I said, I don't know what D.A. is referring to ie. the scripting.
I just go through my list periodically and ban those that don't look like legit readers. It was really bad for a couple of months, but it's eased way off for me in the last several weeks.
Carol. [All cynic, all the time] wrote: "what do you mean about spam, D.A.? I haven't noticed anything."Look in your followers, particularly if you see a huge increase all at once. Some pretty major phishers are showing up. Not necessarily anything beyond what any site getting x number of members attracts but some nasty ones.
I did notice an influx of followers in recent past. One day I had about 50 followers, now I have almost 300. My posts arent THAT interesting, trust me. How do I block the ones that I don't want and may be spammers?
*Michele* aka Meandering Tales wrote: "I did notice an influx of followers in recent past. One day I had about 50 followers, now I have almost 300. My posts arent THAT interesting, trust me. How do I block the ones that I don't want ..."If you go to your friends tab, and choose "followers" you'll see the list of people who are following you. As soon as you hover your mouse pointer over any of their "name squares" for lack of better wording, you'll see a circle-with-a-slash icon appear in the upper right corner of the card. Click it and their banned.
I've had largely normal people following me (you know, as normal as any of us are), with a couple authors and three or four suspicious profiles --one book, no blogging or posting-- but on the whole, nothing spammy at all, and no trolls. It's been a hugely welcome change from GR, where I find it all the time. Suggestions for monthly reads drive me nuts with all the indies suggesting their own books through themselves or proxies.
I've had only quite normal people (Carol's definition!), no spammers, no authors that aren't also blogging like the rest of us. The only thing that drives me insane are the updates. I know they are meaningful to the people who post them every single time they pick up or put down the book/Kindle and I am sure that a lot of their friends like them, but sometimes it seems like my Dash is just a whole series of updates.
I am really pleasantly surprised at how much I'm enjoying BookLikes. Other than a few spam profiles (not heaps) I haven't seen any signs of marketing or spam. It's fantastic. I love reading everyone's reviews and participating in the comments for some of them is a new experience for me - it's great!But I'll be really excited when the book database is released. In the meantime, I spend a lot of time working on the database at Leafmarks, probably driving Jacquie nuts.
❂ Jennifer (reviews on BookLikes) wrote: "If you go to your friends tab, and choose "followers" you'll see the list of people who are following you. As soon as you hover your mouse pointer over any of their "name squares" for lack..."
Thank you! I found it. I had at least 150 spammers and a bunch of followers who I assume just abandoned their accounts.
Thank you! I found it. I had at least 150 spammers and a bunch of followers who I assume just abandoned their accounts.
*Michele* aka Meandering Tales wrote: "Thank you! I found it. I had at least 150 spammers and a bunch of followers who I assume just abandoned their accounts. "I had (have) quite a few of those too. After I posted here I went in and sorted by last activity and flushed out quite a few of them...
I have quite a few that I know joined the initial exodus/checked it out, but never became active. I've left them in hopes they reconsider...
Yeah, that's me. I am following people on BL in order to stay in touch with them and be connected in case I ever become active and I let most follow me. I'm not really very active anywhere anymore but I do more here and at Leafmarks and even LibraryThing than I do at BookMarks. I wish I was more of a fan given that many people I like are active there.
The interaction at Booklikes was pretty much what I was looking for and never found here at GR. I'm enjoying it immensely.
I am enjoying BL a lot.
I haven't had any spam followers. I wonder how they pick who to follow?Willaful, I am not sure what you mean by information gathering scripts?
I use a program called no script that stops some of the gathering of my personal information. Sometimes it interferes with sites working. For examples, right now it's blocking "quantserv.com," "scorecardresearch.com" amazon and facebook and many others. I'm assuming it's what's causing things not to work at BookLikes.
If blocking quantserve caused a page to not work half the internet (including this page we're both looking at) would fail. Actually in this case, while GR serves advertising with the quantserve cookies attached, I can't find any such thing on BL's site. Ditto Scorecardresearch. (And I really did look, pretty hard)The only third party scripts loading on the BL site, make perfect sense to me - I'd list them, but it varies depending on what's on the dash: For instance, s3*amazonaws is pretty common, because that's where the amazon images are stored, twitter and facebook have the "like" and share links. YT loads a script if there's a video on the page.
But it loads perfectly well for me (and always has) with third party coookies turned off, do not track in the browser turned on, the Do Not Track Me plugin in Chrome, and adblock.
Those were examples of scripts on GoodReads, not BookLikes. And yes, you're absolutely right -- I disallowed quantserve yesterday and today I can't search on GoodReads and pages won't load. I'll probably have to allow it again.Booklikes loads for me, but many of the buttons on a book page don't work, include the star rating.
Are you all talking about trackers or something else? Trackers here (per Ghostery):DoubleClick
Facebook connect
Google Analytics
KissInsights
Quantcast (blocked)
Scorecard Research Bea...
I guess Quantcast must be something different from quantserve, since I blocked it everywhere a while back, and I can search here.
Trackers at BookLikes:
DoubleClick
Facebook Connect
Google+1
Google Analytics
Quantcast (blocked)
Twitter Button
Looks pretty much the same. Booklikes is on the front page, though. Maybe more kick in other places.
Quantserve is quantcast. They're very difficult to block entirely. Denying third party cookies does the best job overall. It's interesting though, because both those and doubleclick are usually set by beacons in ads, and .... well, there aren't any. I can't find any anyway (ads, or beacons).Not everything is a tracker though. The G+, facebook connect and twitter buttons are all related to enableable features, they're not there as trackers. YT shows up there too, if there's videos. Most of that's coming from the userlikes.js script, which simply puts the buttons there rather than being trackers.
Analytics is the tracker one, but if you're on a blog page rather than the dash, it's as likely the blogger tracking for stats as anything else (you can put your own analytics id in there).
But for Willaful's problem, I think it's just overaggressive blocking of javascript. Like I said, not every script is a tracker, but the ajax to make the stars change without a page refresh is definitely javascript (BL uses mootools, for what it's worth, you can probably just unblock that script and all the features will work. Or anything named ajax)
Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm not seeing any of those blocked. I may not be looking in the right place... I'll ask my husband to check it out when he gets home. All I'm seeing blocked is twitter, facebook, google analytics and amazonaws. I tried unblocking both of the last two and neither fixed the problem.
Well, I temporarily unblocked all and that fixed it. So it definitely is a script issue, though the question is still which one.
s3*amazonaws could be contributing, it's the amazon content hosting server - not a tracker, it's basically server disk space and bandwidth you can rent and pay by traffic. BL is quite possibly buying space off them and that's where some of the scripts are showing up as hosted. S3 in principle is safe to unblock but that doesn't mean people can't do unsafe things with it either. The ecx server at amazonaws is where a lot of amazon's own stuff lives, from memory - the affiliate links usually point to there, also it's got their image hosting I think (so the book covers). If you can't figure it out I'll happily help you dig through tomorrow when I'm actually awake and not crosseyed.
I'm still a little interested where the quantserve beacons are hiding, that Charming sees, because I just don't have any. But it's very hard to pin down what's coming from where, when every look at the dash is completely different, and we don't follow the same people.
I've been reading this discussion with more than a little awe and the humbling acknowledgement that I'm totally ignorant here. Thank heavens for two blessings, one-no problems, two-if I did my son could take care of it for me.
I also see Pinterest as a tracking cookie on BL. The cookies vary blog to blog somewhat. The one I am on now also has Tynt, several more Google ones and Youtube. I use Disconnect as I had problems with Ghostery and Disconnect seems not to interfere with anything.
willaful wrote: "Well, I temporarily unblocked all and that fixed it. So it definitely is a script issue, though the question is still which one."My star ratings wouldn't work on BL unless I allowed Google +1 through ghostery, which really irritated me b/c I don't want Google tracking anything. But it's the only script I've blocked that broke anything. (Safari, btw)
