Why is it that one user can tag an article with the word “pornography” even though it has clearly been marked as “not adult” by the original discoverer, thus causing referrals to practically dissapear.

This is something I’d never experienced before with StumbleUpon, but it’s quite striking how much of a difference it makes to referrals.

Normally when one of my articles gets added to Stumble, the ratings shoot up for 24-48 hours, then tail off with just the odd extra stumble through later on. That’s how I noticed this occasion, I’d looked at the stats earlier and the predictable spike had begun when some kindly soul stumbled me; but suddenly had stopped almost completely in the hour before I checked.

At first I was stumped – I knew my site wasn’t down because I was drafting an article; and stumbleupon wasn’t down – I was using it at the time. I went and checked the article specifically, no problems there. Then I hovered over the tags… “pornography”. Apparently one random user decided to tag the site with that reference and suddenly my article is tainted; now, if this person simply gets very overexcited about Java I might let them off; but the article in question was about Swing – hardly the most exciting topic.

I couldn’t see why it would be malicious, the site the article was on is technical – there’s very little opinion and just about no criticism. In short, nothing to annoy anyone. Naturally I tried to report the problem when I noticed it, but it’s still there nearly 48 hours later, and the traffic to that article has all but dissapeared. So why, dear Stumble Upon, do you insist on taking the word of one user? Surely it wouldn’t be too much work to prompt a second user to confirm/refute the tag; or maybe just rely on the standard ability to report the site as adult in the original discovery or under the tools->report this stumble as… section.

Come on Stumble, give us some fairer quality control.