Criticism

Flooders and fake profiles

As with any online social networking community, a number of fake and cloned profiles exist on Orkut.^[9] Due to the large number of users, and the deactivation of the jail system, the profiles were often left unremoved or, when removed, recreated easily. These profiles are normally created to troll, to spam, to flood or just for fun. It is not hard to find users owning more than one profile, with some stating they own hundreds.

In 2005 invisible profiles, communities and topics started to appear in Orkut. This could be achieved by using HTML escaping codes and 1x1 pixel photos to fool the engine behind the site.^[10] This hole was later fixed, and currently there is a lower limit on profile image dimensions.

In August 2005 a freeware program was made in Delphi called Floodtudo ("tudo" in Portuguese means "everything" - this was developed by a Brazilian) specifically for flooding Orkut. It quickly spread through the users and was easily downloadable (the most common Floodtudo versions were 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 and 2.2). As this program was massively used by thousands of spammers, a big spam wave struck Orkut in September and October 2005.

As the flooding of Orkut was becoming out of control, the developers implemented some features in order to stop this. These features included not allowing two or more verbatim topics or scrapbook entries to be submitted, forcing the user to wait before posting another topic or scrapbook entry, and the usage of captchas, whenever a scrap entry is hyperlinked. They gave more rights to community moderators as well, so that users can be banned outright instead of relying on the developers to remove them.