NEWSFLASH! A Squidoo Policy Update

For a few years now we have had a very strict and enforced stance against spam. That's staying the same, and if anything, getting even more rigorous.

What's spam?

The kind of spam that the world is (unfortunately) the most familiar with is email spam. Unwanted, irrelevant, selfish, and often automated email from scammers and tricksters and people out to waste your time. From people who don't have your permission to talk to you. Over the last few years, this has metastasized into blog comment spam and social network spam.

Spam is also commonly defined, and more generically, as the act of tricking people with useless content. It's is an aggressive act. It means stuffing pages full of keywords or links to trick search engines. It means masking links to surprising places. It means redirecting traffic. It means lying to your readers and taking advantage of them.

We don't tolerate spam at Squidoo. If you find spam, please tell us! If you find a great lens, tell everyone.

If you spam people with your Squidoo lenses, either by email, or in blog comments, or by stalking and harassing people on Twitter, or by tricking people with the content in your lenses, we'll probably just lock your entire account.

If you think your lenses might violate any of our new policies, we heartily encourage you to do a few things before the middle of July 2009.

1) Ask some fellow lensmasters in this peer-driven forum! See if they're willing to suggest changes or ideas for making sure your lens is filled with authentic, curated, useful content on topics that don't feel like spam or junk.

2) Edit your lenses to make any changes you think are needed according to our policy update. You've got over a month before we implement most of these new policies, so that should be plenty of time to do a quick review of your lenses, just to be sure!

3) If you have X-rated lenses with Adult content, or lenses focused on any of our spam or junk topics, you might consider saving yourself the hassle and just deleting them yourselves. If you go near the edges of what we've laid out here, chances are your lens will get locked and then deleted.

4) Last: If our policies have convinced you that Squidoo is no longer for you, you're welcome and encouraged to export your lens content and take it with you to use it somewhere else on the web. We don't want anyone to lose content they worked hard on, even if it's not in accordance with our policies, so we're giving you this long heads-up period to save your lens and take it with you, before we lock it or remove it from the site.

If any of these policies don't mesh with your publishing goals, here's a way to save your content before your lens gets locked or deleted.

It's easy, but hurry, we'll start implementing all these new policies starting July 15th 2009.

1. Edit the lens you want to export.

2. Scroll down in your Workshop and look for Export in the right hand sidebar.

3. Click.

4. The XML export contains all of the text and configuration settings you made on your lens.

5. You could also choose File -> Save Webpage in your browser. This even saves the images to a directory.

6. Once you've stored all your content on to your personal computer or drive or storage space, you're welcome to delete the lens. Just go to your Dashboard in Squidoo, find the lens in your list, and click delete.