Inside LabourStart

Spam-free at last?

We’ve had a severe problem of spammers for several months now on UnionBook which has inhibited growth and left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth.

We’ve tried everything — installing and configuring plugins, calling on the help of the one senior Elgg programmer who’s worked with us before, posted online messages to the Elgg community, written directly to the the authors of the Elgg software, tried to recruit a freelancer who knows Elgg from the elance site, tried to tweak the software ourselves, etc, etc.

Nothing has worked.

However, finally, we have an Elgg programmer on board who is willing to help.  So let’s hope we’re now seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and can get a handle on this problem so that we can move on.

The first 24 hours of the campaign in support of the United Steelworkers (Canada) have been very good — nearly 2,000 messages sent and translations done into French, German and Portuguese.  (The last is very good news — it’s been a long time since we’ve had a campaign in Portuguese.)  Both the union and the global union federation (IMF) are promoting the campaign, and we’ve also got the support of the ICEM on this one.  We’ve got a lot of news stories linked to this, and we’re expecting translations into additional languages today — including, I hope, Russian.

There is already considerable interest in the photo.  For example:

• The Education International wants to use it in their magazine and has asked the photographer for permission.
• The International Metalworkers Federation will use it in an upcoming story — I think on the web.
• Amnesty International wants to use it in their glossy, full colour UK trade union magazine.

In addition, while there have only been 17 comments posted on Flickr since we announced the results (because you have to be signed in to Flickr in order to comment), Asad’s photo has been viewed 10,424 times — which is pretty amazing.

K M Asad's winning photo. "A Bangladeshi boy works in a shipbuilding factory in down town."

We have a winner.  3,203 votes were cast in this year’s Labour Photo of the Year competition, our second ever, and the winner by a huge margin was K M Asad’s photo entitled ‘Manual labor’.

Almost half of those voting chose this photo – to see a full breakdown of votes per photo, go here.

A very big thanks to Mac Urata for coming up with the idea last year and for agreeing to be a judge this year and last (and for translating the page into Japanese), to Derek Blackadder for once again coordinating the effort, to judges Gretchen Donart and David Bacon for once again picking an outstanding shortlist, to all the photographers who submitted entries and to the thousands of our readers who looked at them and chose the best.

It looks like this is going to be an annual event and I think our main task next year is to try to make the whole process, from submission of photo right up through the voting a multilingual one, so that all our readers can take part.  (This may mean no longer relying on Flickr — we’ll need to look into this.)