Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
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.
So why not try the best anti-spam tool on the market and wave goodbye to those pesky spams?!
Perhaps these 'web logs' could come up with a kind of 'moderation system' to let users filter out the crap.
Use the same type of human verification system that Yahoo uses when signing up for an e-mail account. If you can't type in the mangled letters in the image, then your post to the weblog is ignored. This would only be required for anonymous postings - if you're logged in, presumably you've already passed the human verification test upon account creation, so you don't have to go through the hassle each time you want to post.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Although the term flyblog has been used already to mean either blogging about flying, or blogging while flying, I would like to claim it for the practice of posting spam comments to people's blogs like this: I have just been comprehensively flyblogged
I like I have been splamogged much better. Just rolls off the tongue.
I had the same problem with the guestbook on my website. I was used to the occasional, manually entered, advertisement that I would then promptly remove. However, suddenly my guestbook was being hit with dozens of spam advertisements at a time, all at the same time. This was taking place every couple of days. It was always the same ads with bogus compliments, but the source IP addresses would vary widely from attack to attack. A review of my access log showed spybots looking for the presence of certain common guestbook scripts, one of which I was using. Then later, the spambot would hit my site executing the scripts directly. I got around it by changing the file name of the script. Normal users to my site would follow the link and get to the guestbook with no problem. But since the spambots depended on the script being a certain name, they would fail with a 404 error.
Phoenix
*ducks*
Have you read the comments most people post on these things, anyway? They're even more asinine than the weblogs themselves...
::)
Yeah I mean who reads these comments anyway? Can you imagine a site full of these asinine people writting about stuff they don't even know the first thing about?
What a stupid stupid idea
-- taking over the world, we are.
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The BBC article misses the point, as does a similar article in Wired. Seems the editors are more focused on name-dropping and doomsdaying than on focusing on some recent solutions. For example:
Point is
Just so long as no one attempts to use a rather evil solution I discovered here on
--- have you healed your church website?
I think the ads in the blogs are going for better Google PageRank scores, rather than for direct exposure. Most blogs don't get a whole lot of traffic, mostly just family and friends, if even that much. Only a very small percentage of that audience will click, and they surely won't fall for it more than once.
But google reads a lots of blogs. If a spammer gets their link onto a whole lot of blogs, Google PageRank would see hundreds or thousands of links to their site and bump up its rank. They exploit everyone's blog in order to improve their score on searches.
That's the theory anyway. Whether or not it works is another story.
blog
My hobbyist project was picked up by Google after a while, but it wasn't until I retroactively changed my comment signature here on Slashdot and on Kuro5hin (thereby creating many links to my project page) that it went to the top of the search results. It wasn't my intent to subvert Google in any way - I was quite surprised by the dramatic result.
There have been some less-than-scrupulous advertising companies in the business of that publishing dummy machine-generated web pages to exploit this trick. The dummy pages were typically filled with repitions of some nonsense paragraph, with self-links (to other dummy pages) and client-sponsored links interspersed here and there. The idea was that the self-linking would make the site look like a large, legit site to Google, which would mark it as relatively well-trusted and influential. Then Google would dutifully note the client-sponsored links and rank them highly. I believe Google has worked on ways to stop this; I don't know how successful they've been, or if the dummy-site makers are still around.
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.