It has come to our attention recently that some producers of podcasts are taking measures to ensure their posts stay on the front page of Blubrry longer than they should. I won’t go into the methods but I think its worthwhile to point out that it is happening and let people know what we’re doing about it.
First off, we’re actively looking at content on the site to see what’s happening and identify bad behavior like spam feeds and gaming of the podcast listing pages. There are a lot of feeds coming through so this takes time and is not a perfect process. We’re also following up on items submitted by members of the community who think that something fishy is going on. And please do contact us if you think something is not right.
Once we identify something we’ll do our best to determine if something is truly amiss. We don’t want to penalize podcasters making honest mistakes. If we find a spam feed we’ll simply delete the feed. If it’s something other than a spam feed we’ll take actions on the technical side to beef up our anti-gaming functionality. This may take a little time since we don’t want to negatively impact those who are playing it straight.
This community is for people who want to build their shows, raise visibility and maybe earn some money in the process. We take those ideas seriously and want you to know that we’re going to do our best to mitigate situations that jeopardize those benefits.