Slashdot Mirror
Google Cans Comment Spam
fthiess writes "Comment spam is in many ways even more annoying than regular email spam, since you generally have to do more than just hit the delete button to get rid of it. Its defining characteristic is that spammers abuse websites where the public can add content (blogs, wikis, forums, and even top referrer lists) to increase their own ranking in search engines. It seems, however, that the days of content spam are numbered: today Google announced that, in partnership with MSN Search and Yahoo!, that they have implemented a way to block content spam." (More below.)
"Briefly, you just change your blogging/wiki/forum/etc. software so that any hyperlinks in publicly-contributed text have a new rel=nofollow attribute added to any anchor tags. Google, MSN, and Yahoo! will now no longer index any such links, so the motive for content spamming disappears. Especially hopeful is the fact that a slew of makers of blogging software, including Six Apart, have announced they are supporting the new attribute."
It's nice to see Google, MSN, and Yahoo cooperating on this effort.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Does HTML/XHTML allow "rel" attributes on links? And if so, is "nofollow" an allowed value for that tag?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Slashdot could implement something like this, it would make article comments meaningful again.
They could even selectively add or omit it based on the comment's moderation. Include the nofollow tag by default, but if a comment with a link in it is moderated highly, remove the tag so search engines can use it. Sounds like the best of both worlds..
The comment spam is mostly used to get a better searchengine ranking. A blog which uses this attibute on link tags is far less interesting to comment spammers, so chances are the moderaters have to delete less spam.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
RTFA. Slashdot could modify slashcode to automatically add the attribute to all links posted in comments. Comment spammers can't do anything about it, so they'll move away to other sites.
No normal links (i.e. not in visitor contributed content) should have the attribute. So slashdot will still be full of normal links; only the links in the comments will have the attribute.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
Censorship? Are you saying that's a bad thing.
How's that old saying go? Your right to free speech ends at my rights to kick you in the nuts when you spam me.
Something like that, anyway...
Let me introduce you to the wondeful world of userContent.css.
Something like this should work:
Links in the main body of the blog post will be fine. Blogs of course, have high page rank because bloggers comment on each other's blogs. This tag may have a side effect of generally reducing the page rank of blogs.
As for useful links in comments; if they're really good sites, people are bound to blog about them more generally. And my poor blog gets few enough hits that it will be no problem for me to manually edit genuine comments to remove nofollow tags.
But somehow I don't think spammers really care if a blog uses this system or not. It's probably easier to just spam all blogs than to figure out which are useless. Just like email spammers don't care much if an address is valid or not.
Some people think that adding spam filters to an email account reduces the spam sent, while it only reduces the amount of spam received. This solution does neither.
However, all efforts to fight spam should be welcomed and supported. Despite my pessimism, it will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Sysadmin Geeks who have to clean up the messes left by shoddy Microsoft products, day after day, hate their products because they make extra work for us. We hate Outlook, IE, and IIS because their penchant for spreading worms and viruses. We hate service packs which break more than they fix. We hate Frontpage because of the non-standard, blecherous, broken HTML it spews forth. We hate the general lackadasical attitude Microsoft has about security and quality in general.
Libertarian-minded geeks hate Microsoft for their flagrant disregard for the law and the courts. We hate them for the way they blatantly infringe on other company's patents and lawyer their way out of it. We hate the way they bankrupt or buy out anyone making a product which actually competes with them. We hate the way they use puppet companies (SCO, BSA) as hired thugs to bully other companies on their behalf.
Anti-corporate geeks hate Microsoft because it's a prime example of corporate greed run amok and of the dangers of unfettered capitalism.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?