Shelley Powers: In the meantime, here’s a surefire method of preventing comment spam
WOW. Every once in a while somebody steps up and concisely states something that, in retrospect, should have been so blindingly obvious that you have to hit yourself in the head and say "why didn't I see that before".
This is one of those times.
Spammers aren't going to spend their precious time checking to see how you have implemented nofollow. Despite having implemented nofollow on the Atom wiki, spam attempts continue to increase there.
But spammers will seek out those with precious pagerank and focus their efforts there. Most spam attempts are preceded by google queries for words like add your comment and edit this page.
Duh.
So, the surefire way to eliminate comment spam is to drop out. Not just from Google, but also from Technorati tags, and no advertising by pinging weblogs.com or equivalent either.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
So, the question is: what's worth fighting for. For Shelley, it is comments. For Gordon, it is links. At the moment, I tend to lean towards Gordon's point of view. To be fair, Shelley provides similar support on her blog, and is experimenting with new ideas.
Meanwhile, if you are using IE 5.5 on Windows 98 and you don't provide a referer, don't bother trying to post to the Atom wiki. You are not worth fighting for.
Meanwhile, if you are using IE 5.5 on Windows 98 and you don't provide a referer, don't bother trying to post to the Atom wiki. You are not worth fighting for.
Hmmm. That doesn't explain why my home machine is blocked from your blog but surprisingly not your RSS feed.
Anton,
You send Mark a big fat check, like with lots of zeros. He comes back from "retirement" and in his debut post he links to you. Boom tons of people find your blog.
Phil,
Those darn spammers using those darn tools "we've" built for them. Who knew they'd be abused....
Anton - that actually was the point. There is more to life than popularity.
Dare - if you send me some details (like time of day, what page you were trying to access), I will look into it. That shouldn't be happening. And the block on that particular version of IE with no referers is only on POSTs to the wiki.
Jason - I get much more spam on my wiki than on my blog. The word that people use? Wiki. It looks like Atom dropped off of the front page of that particular query, but I can tell you that spammers will go through dozens of pages. Some try to be clever and post something remotely on topic and reference a "blog" that appears outwardly normal, but you can trace back to the query that they issued and see comments within minutes on the weblogs that appear just before or after yours on the query.
Julian - some spam is automated, much of it seems to come from eastern block countries and even the far east. Until recently, all of the spam on the wiki was manual. Now somebody seems to have created a new toy, one that exploits proxies and drones. That's the one that I am targetting with the match on user-agent and referer.
Could they get around that? Definitely. But if they were smart enough to read this post, they would be smart enough to realize that with nofollow there is no value in what they are doing. But as we all know Spammers don't read blogs; they just write to them.
Mark,
Sorry. When I said "retirement" I was simply referring to your blog. My internet bloodhounds have detected your tracks in cyberspace.
Julian,
As Sam said, most is automated. We in wordpress land are getting hammered nicely because we're the new MT I guess. As for any novel spam prevention technique. Once it gets distributed widely enough a new tool will be constructed to take advantage. If it's low barrier for participation is will be low barrier for abuse.
Sam,
Rumour is spammers don't just read blogs they apparently have them too
In the case of auto theft, crime never goes down, it just disproportionately affects those without Clubs, until everyone has a Club, theft still hasn't gone down, everybody's out $20, and we’re all back where we started. In the case of email obfuscation, harvesters never go away, they just disproportionately affect those who don’t obfuscate, until enough people obfuscate that the harvesters get smarter, everybody's wasted a lot of time, everybody's email is still getting harvested, and we're all back where we started. In the case of comment spam...
Sorry, Sam, I probably shouldn't have actually hyperlinked that. Or I should have thought to try adding the nofollow myself (not sure if your system would have filtered it, though?) ;)
But I just wanted to point out that spammers are taking advantage of search engines and popular search terms in other ways, as well.
Dougal: don't worry about it, and no, there is currently no way for you to control which links are nofollow.
Anil, I fully expect that there would be a market for walled gardens. I am not part of that demographic. I participate in enough such cloistered environments in my life - this space is where I get away from all that, and in the process get exposed to fresh ideas and insights.
Dare: If we look at the comment thread so far, exactly one is on my current IM buddylist.
Actually, to try to redeem my snarkiness with something useful, I think the ideal is not a walled garden but an ACL with an entry for "everyone". I use the close friends I first met as random blog-wanderers as the justification for keeping my site as open as possible, too.
I'm wondering, though, how much search engine discoverability is a factor in serendipity. I'd suggest it's at least one of the raw elements required for manufacturing, at least as we've known it thus far. And I haven't seen anything lately that would take its place, but perhaps that's been for lack of incentives to create it.