The blacklist counter from hell

The blacklisted page up until now listed all your hits on blacklists. That is, every hit is a separate entry in the table on your screen and is counted as a problem. The number of problems you have screams at you as a number in a red dot in the menu on your screen. Sounds good right?

As one client showed me, some ideas sound good in theory but turn into the blacklist counter from hell in practice. ShadowTrackr at this moment checks your ip addresses and websites against 127 blacklists. A lot of these blacklists overlap and from a security point of view that's just fine. You'd rather be notified twice than not at all.

When an ip gets listed as a source of SPAM on one blacklist, the chances are high that a couple of other blacklists will pick it up too. Since the counter counted the number of blacklist entries, 2 machines getting listed on 4 spamlists resulted in the number 8 screaming at you from the bright red dot. That is not the user experience I intended. In that case you have 2 problems, not 8. The counter is fixed now, and all blacklist entries are sorted per asset now.

What remains is the question on how to handle notifications. For the first time your asset is listed on any blacklist, everyone will want to receive a notification. But how about the second or third blacklist that same asset gets listed on? Do you want to know? I myself would like to get notified of every extra blacklist an asset appears on, so I left it on for now. But if enough users convince me otherwise I'll be happy to turn it off of course. Just let me know!