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Bulk Spell Correction  (View post)

Dan Keenan [PersonRank 0]

Thursday, November 8, 2007
16 years ago13,618 views

If the service does come out, it would probably be better if webmasters could select their websites not to get this kind of a thing (maybe using something like <--NOSPELL--> and <--/NOSPELL--> or something along those lines). This might be useful if the webmaster doesn't want those e-mails at all, or wants to block out certain sections, like Comments and Forums.

Jleagle [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

I would not consider that as spam. It isn't simply sending the same message to a list of people, its finding a problem with a website and letting the admin know about it, on a large scale.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Of course, the site would also need to know the language of my website. (I don't want some American service telling me I've spelt "colour" incorrectly.)

If there were *never* false positives, I wouldn't mind receiving these emails. But I don't think that's ever gonna happen...

Schultzter [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Spam is only spam if you don't want it. Granted a lot of spam is generally un-wanted, but there is some that is subjective – and temporal, like the photo printing service I NO LONGER USE that still sends me ad e-mails which I consider spam versus the photo printing service I use now that e-mails me ads which I do not consider spam.

Also for Dan: more tags are not the solution!!! At most I would accept a META or robots.txt entry. But my preferred solution is if this "service" used a consistent e-mail address that I could filter out. That makes it easy for me to deal with rather than littering proprietary tags all over my web pages.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Maybe Google could add this feature to their Webmaster Tools. They can already guess the language of a website and make spelling suggestions. Just like you can view which pages return 404 errors, you could also view pages which contain spelling errors. That would be a much better way of implementing a service like this.

Mike Wyman [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

This sounds like Google's answer to Microsoft's Clippy! :)

I can't think of anything I would find more annoying. What's wrong with the spell checking capabilities of the various composition tools? As I compose this comment with Firefox, I have immediate, unobtrusive indication of potential spelling errors.

Cal J [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

No...it's still spam. And not really much different from a vacuum cleaner salesman making his way into your home, pointing out a dirty spot on your carpet, and then hitting you with a sales pitch.

Tony mentioned false positives, and that's why I think this still qualifies as spam – because maybe you DID mean to write "srevice". How many times will this particular "service" send you emails telling you that you're spelling something wrong, when you're not?

Pierre S [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I think Tony's Idea is the best.
Webmasters Tools should help improve the web's overall quality. Moreover, it would be difficult to find the webmaster's relevant address and avoiding sending mails to 3rd party addresses on the website, while WT allows to target webmasters

Disclaimer: this post was spellchecked using Firefox's built in spellchecker, a feature that most modern browsers have and that webpages editing tools should have in the first place.

Markus [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Many People would consider this as spam, so probably the mail server would be blacklisted by some major RBLs and the text pattern would be added to spam filters and within a short period of time.
So, if your mailbox is behind a spam filter you would not get these emails, anymore after a few days.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

In 1998 I started to receive regular unsolicited automated emails from a service that spidered the web and reported broken links.

At first, they just sent broken link reports and I found the service useful. Later, they started including ads for their website monitoring/alert service. Then, they started including other unrelated ads and I decided the service was more trouble than it was worth.

I agree with the other posters who said: if you didn't ask for it, it's spam.

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Philipp wrote:
> but what if the spam mail ... would be actually useful for a change?

If it's useful, then the service will catch on virally without needing to be sent as spam.

Markus [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Hello,

While browsing your rss feed, I noticed that there is a spelling error here:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-11-08-n36.html. The paragraph reads “Google released a new *srevice*...” but it should read “service”. We hope this helps.

Bye,
www.SpellCheckingTipsToday.com

Pierre S [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Hello Markus,
While browsing your comment, I noticed that there is a spelling error here:

"Hello,

While browsing your rss feed, I noticed that there is a spelling error here:
blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-1 ... The paragraph reads “Google released a new *srevice*...” but it should read “service”. We hope this helps.

Bye,
www.SpellCheckingTipsToday.com"

We hope this helps.

Bye,
www.infiniteloopcorrectingsystem.com

The webmaster of Slangpoetry.com [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Dear SpellCheckingTipsToday.com

You won. I can't take it anymore. Over the past 6 months , you've sent me a total of 67894 emails about my pages and poems. I therefore officially give up any promotion of the slang culture and I will join the National Straightness in Spelling Association. Oh and by the way, I've spotted on your website what might be a problem with your time concordance and ...

Jarlaxle [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

I love it. This would be an amazing tool.

Michael Beck [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Pierre S hits it right on the head – for intentional misspellings you could end up with a hefty number of "misspelling notices" in your inbox.

I bet they'd tune the system to just go after common typos to avoid that kind of mess.

milivella [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Great question. IMO, it shows the limits of a definition of spam as just "unwanted" (that could be too rigid even for personal e-mails to persons you don't know, or even to friends).

Personally, I wouldn't feel this as spam.

Zim [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I'll take it as spam anyway. It may be useful, but formaly is spam.
Something similar happens with viruses. Some of them destroy files, while other ones play a joke and are harmless. It's still a virus, not a joke...

SpellBot [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Hello,

While browsing blogoscoped.com/archive/123.html, I noticed that there is a spelling error. The paragraph reads “*Google* released a new service...” but it should read “msn”. For your convenience opening this e-mail has automatically applied the corrections to your server. We hope this helps.

To opt out of this srevice for the next 72 hours please login to your passport account from an authenticated Windows Vista machine.

Bye,
www.LiveSpellCheckingTipsToday.com

CopyrightBot [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Hello,

While browsing blogoscoped.com/archive/123.html, I noticed that there is a copyright violation. The paragraph reads “Google released a new *service*...” but the original read “srevice”. We hope this helps.

Bye,
www.CopyrightCheckingTipsToday.com

Mark [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

We do this for free :)

http://www.furtheronline.co.uk/free-website-spellcheck/

pjh [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

I actually did have an unsolicited email rather like this a while back. It basically pointed out several broken links on a 'links' page of my website (and the correct locations of the pages), before "suggesting" that I put a link to their website – which was almost completely irrelevant to the topic of the site!

A couple of weeks later I got another email from them thanking me for correcting the links (I hadn't yet!), and again trying to promote their service.

I ended up correcting the links but ignoring their advice about linking to them. So I reckon this "spam" message actually was quite useful overall.

Dave [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

...Not really.

If the author of a site is sloppy enough to make spelling errors on public documents, this should be alarm bells telling me they may be as sloppy in other areas (it's not like spell checkers are rare these days, is it?). Would their services, payment processes, or products hold up to the same standard as their spelling? (I'd be inclined to think so...)

I'd also question the intent of spelling errors, which may be deliberate. Would UK or international English spellings flag as a misspelt US-English document?

Would they go sort out the spelling of sites like flickr, frappr, mappr, and so on?

Madness.

Dennis Jerz [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Two words: opt in.

Andrew Bell [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

I personally get a couple dozen emails a day at least, sometimes as many as 60 or more. All that I have to read (page+ usually) and reply to, the last thing I need is someone of no concern to me emailing me, be it a company ro automated spam program or whatever.

Spam is just that spam, mail you don't want in your inbox. Now if these companies paid me $20 for every email of there's I opened and read, then ok, I would accept that, otherwise, they can go to hell. my2cents8 </rant>

Ash [PersonRank 1]

16 years ago #

Just wait till it gets on your forums and you get 10k emails about almost every thread ;p

Elwen [PersonRank 0]

16 years ago #

Like pjh, I've received the broken links version of this kind of service/spam. That was borderline: somewhat useful, but still pretty annoying. The spelling version would probably be more annoying and less useful, so I say it falls into unwanted mail category.

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