Spam Rapidly Increasing In Weblog Comments

dsurber writes "BBC News has a nice article discussing 'flyblogging', the phenomenon of spammers leaving advertising-related posts on personal weblogs. The writer comments: 'None of the other blogs I contribute to or run has been affected yet, but I can only assume it is a matter of time before the spammers move in, as they did first with UseNet and then with e-mail. It depresses me to think that any open medium can be so easily undermined by people with no scruples, no sense of responsibility and no idea of the damage they are doing.'" It seems a little surreal that people are having to develop anti-spam weblog tools.

Comments

Wikis too?

[Thinkit3]

They would seem vulnerable to spamming. I was on a lojban wiki for awhile which was under the radar enough to avoid it, but don't know about now.

Here's My Solution

[notsewmit]

Since most blog spammers will search for "Remember personal info?" in various search engines to quickly find personal blogs, I edited my MovableType templates. Now, instead of saying "Remember personal info?" on the comments page, I have something else that spammers don't normally search for.

Re:I've Noticed

[mcrbids]

The solution is simple: stop buying what spammers are offering and they will go under soon after.

This is one of those simple-sounding, and utterly worthless "solutions".

You see, you can stop buying what the spammers are offering, but will everybody else? You see, this world is chock-full of people who just don't get it when it comes to spam. They don't realize the mechanical nature of SPAM, many think the message was sent by somebody to them personally.

Scams were common in the 20th, 19th, 18th, 15th, and 11th century, why would they stop now?

So, really, what you in fact just said was " The solution is simple: change human nature for every person on the earth to a very cynical nature and then spend billions of dollars in education so that people know what SPAM is and how best to treat it, and they will go under soon after." .

Utopia doesn't exist, and won't as long as there are people to pollute it. In the meantime, we have to deal with the fact that this world has both unscrupulous people and suckers.

The solution is to change the protocol of Email to introduce enough resistance to communication to thwart SPAM. Until that happens, SPAM will be a problem.

Re:Why let users comment on your blog at all?

[poot_rootbeer]

Make your blog read-only and the spam problem goes away.

Doesn't it?

Yes, but in many cases so also will the blog's audience go away.

One of the key atttractions of small-to-middle-sized weblogs is the interactivity. If the blog author says something incorrect, you can let him know. If you have additional information pertaining to something a blogger wrote about, you can share it with her.

Without comments, blogs are just another one-way communications medium. Not to say that's an undesirable thing, but we already have plenty of those.

Re:Don't be rediculous

[CGP314]

Actually, I think a bigger problem would be audience size. You need to reach a certain critical mass before the moderation system would work. Most blogs, my own included, do not have the necessary audience.

Re:I have a quick and dirty solution.

[4of12]

That excludes people who prefer to browse using text, which is what that image recognition filter effectively does. Blind people, low bandwidth folks are automatically eliminated from the community.

Requiring a periodic human response at the other end of a live email address, after a time interval, helps some. It's still possible for spammers to cultivate a temporary reputation of responsibility and spam a site as their last post, but requiring them to periodically exert effort to prove they're authentically human helps to make spamming hard work.

It wouldn't hurt for sites to start keeping a growing list of bad urls and poisoned posters. A spider that visits url's, maybe one or two deep after the posted URL (phenomena of delayed appearance of herbal viagara behind URLs that are opaque looking), checks for spam links, and assigns big negative karma would help some, especially if it runs before the posting appears on the blog.