Last Friday at Posterous we launched a major feature, Pages. We got some really great coverage, including an article from the folks at the Blog Herald. We're always thrilled to see our features being covered, but we were a little surprised at the title: Are Posterous Pages potentially dangerous? The answer of course is an unequivocal NO. They're no more dangerous than normal HTML pages, or links, or redirects that happen every single day on every web browser on the planet. Yes it is possible to link to any kind of content on the web, even spam or malware. But that's our job to keep it off our network. That's a job we take seriously. And when you report it, we take action immediately. Some commenters suggested that we show an interstitial page similar to the one Facebook shows for external links, like so:
We don't want to do that if we can help it. If anything that just reinforces this idea that the web is an overly dangerous place. Showing interstitials does not absolve your service of any possible problems from visiting scammy or spammy links. The real solution, and the solution we take at Posterous, is that we shut down scammy and spammy sites and those Posterous blogs that link to them. And that's the right kind of solution that doesn't ruin the web experience that we believe in. The web, as in real life, can be a dangerous place. But it is our duty to police it and leave it a better place than before. No, the aliens aren't trying to read your brain waves. You can leave your foil helmets at home.
