Slashdot Mirror
The Ham and Spam of Weblogs
An anonymous reader submits "Will the blogosphere become just as spammy as Usenet? There may be over 10M weblogs out there, most of them seem to be fake spam blogs created to manipulate the search engines. Scott Johnson, CTO at Feedster, complained that "at times we see upwards of 90% of the traffic from Blogspot being spam," and the problem is likely to only get worse. Can blog search engines like Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub filter the signal from the torrent of noise? Or will we have to seek new approaches such as the social filtering used by Del.icio.us or collaborative filtering used by Findory to separate the ham from the spam?"
I wish Google had an option to exclude blogs from my search. Considering many blogs use b2evolution, phpBB, or whatever, Google could easily determine what IS a blog and what IS NOT and filter it accordingly. Google IMHO would be a much better place if I could exlude blogs and those stupid parked domain search sites from my queries.
::242
I'm not trying to be flamebait; It would be a nice option though.
90% of EVERYTHING is crap. It just happens that weblogs trend toward a specific TYPE of crap -- SPAM. I mean you may think JeffK is crap, but some of us find him funny, so anything with actual content has to be not crap to somebody (if only the creator). That means all the crap must be content-free.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The guy makes a good point...human validation via captcha. If you're going to spend 10 minutes complaining, whining, bragging and/or loathing about something then you can spend 3 seconds typing in the word "uNFsaQ" to prove you're human.
If it takes you less than 10 minutes to write in your dear diary--I mean blog--then it's probably a 1 liner to the effect of "i think she likez me omglolbbq!!!" and you need to get off my internet.
Problem solved. Next?
"blogosphere"? Considering that blogs are probably the dumbest form of communication possible (a linear log of rambling bullshit) I can only hope that the Blogosphere is destroyed by the Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for a colonic bypass.
With email spam filtering you have to consider each email separately. A blog has a persistent identity and reputation. In theory, this should make it easier to filter blog spam than email spam. On results of this type of filtering is that it will will penalize new blogs in search results, both spammy and real.
Blog comment spam will remain a problem, of course.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Too much ham and spam is bad for you. No wonder the email servers are always choking.
Who is going to pay $1 to read about how your boyfriend dumped you last week and you're still crying in bed. Blog comment spam isn't all that hard to get rid of (filter links, filter content, or if you're just worried about search engines, use rel="nofollow").
Anyone who has a blog that you have to pay to comment on (or to see) isn't going to get much traffic.
I just wanted to point out that so-called "social software" is not social. Person-to-person communication through computers is mediated and indirect. Technology is a barrier to communication as much as it is an enabler. I agree that it is an enabler in situations where it is used to help overcome disabilities and things of that nature, however technology is used moreso by people who are actually avoiding being social. Email is often preferable to a telephone because it creates an additional barrier between ourselves and the "recipient" (aka person).
A prime example of software in a "social" context is the chatter that accompanies networked video games. This does not form real relationships between people. I heard a teenager recently say that his gaming buddies, who he doesn't even know by name, are like family to him. Technology has helped a whole generation and then some to fail to learn what real relationships are. When a teenager can't distinguish between somebody he's only ever witnessed virtually shoot ze germans and the people who nurtured him before he was able to take care of himself, we have a problem Houston.
And it's only getting worse. Now we've begun adding "social" in front of all kinds of new web applications. Anything that lets other users see your profile and the items you post and comment on them is seen as a valid replacement for real human contact.
There was a line from a movie I saw recently called Crash, where Don Cheadle's character says to his girlfriend "It's the sense of touch. Any real city you walk, you know. You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that sense of touch so much, that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.". The next time we use the word "social" to describe a new type of web application, I think we should give that some thought first.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
QuickTrack, check it out.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It was a bit unintuitive how you add sites to the filter list though -- just cut and paste "http://*.whatever.com/*" into your extensions list and any search results from whatever.com will then be greyed out.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Slashdot is a blog, created in the context of a news site, which we all come to and bitch about things we want out of technology, think is/are cool, and/or hate and want everyone to know why.
That being said, Google (along with other large search engines) have already taken stances on blogging, and are actively pursuing their individual stances. For most, this is creating their own blog service, and doing some shifting in their code to make sure blogs don't come out on top. But this isn't an absolute truth.
If you want these things, and Google doesn't offer them, make your own search engine, and do it better. No, seriously, don't look at me like I'm crazy; there have been over a dozen "major" search engines created after Google, some are only in serious use by geeky populations (AlltheWeb, as far as I can tell, fits this), some by the trendy, some by the "I hate Google"ites, etc. etc. It's as simple as that.
One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options, especially ones you can deal with yourself by subtracting out the majorly offensive sites (-livejournal -blogger -blogspot, etc).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
People are using blogs and forums to post links to their own sites. These links show up as backlinks to Google, and due to Google's ranking procedure that determines which website is the most relevant to each search, each extra backlink pointing to a website can effectively make that website more relevant in the searches.
Luckily, Google is one step ahead of the spammers, and has allowed only one link from each forum to contribute as a valid backlink. Therefore, having 100 forum signatures linking to www.spamdomain.com will no longer give credit for 100 backlinks; Only one backlink will be credited towards www.spamdomain.com. The problem is, alot of people have not realised that Google has done this yet, and as a result, people are still adding 8+ forum signature links in their posts, hoping to cheat the search engine ranking system.
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
In the Wired article (I know this isn't about spam, but what the hell):
"Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content."
Uh, no, not as far as I can tell. "Frozen in time," perhaps, after someone decided to stop blogging, but I used blogger for six months and never had a single hitch. Apparently, googling "blogger sucks" gives you thousands of sites bitching about google's service.
Sometimes there are outages, when you can't get in to alter a post or something similar, but those were few and far between (at least they happened less than half a dozen times in six months, and it only lasted a few hours.)
I guess this is a sign about how popular blogger is. I mean, then only way to balance my experience (zero fatal errors in six months) with thousands of complaints is to assume that there are a HELL of a lot of bloggers out there.
Oh, and to those bitching in general about blogs: please shut up. Yes, there are annoying vanity blogs, but blogger -- and the blogging concept -- has been a godsend to specialists, as well as to political organizing.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
I'd say blogs are more than just what you've said. Hear me out.
Blogs are a new form of communication. Before, we had "editorials" which were published in newspapers, where someone of stature is making their opinion well known, simply to spark debate and interest in the public's mind. Now this is a turn for everyone to have their own editorial, and to foster debate and discusion. Welcome to Slashdot, by the way.
Secondly, they offer a form of sympathy to the author; normally someone either says "I like your book" or "I don't like your book". This gives people a chance to say "Well, I liked your book, but the ending could be better. I don't think Saffron shoulda died when she fell into the swimming pool" or something like that. Sometimes it's rewarding to write something, but you never know how other people relate to it, and this is just a great opportunity to get that feedback, instantly.
Lastly, it's an insight into the person. It shows what that person values by what they write about often. It shows how educated the person is by word choice and by sentence structure. It shows how thoughtful the person is when they ask questions. It shows how we're different, as people.
Honestly, I think the problem is that nobody thought about the problem before it existed. When we thought of the Internet, we thought of it as a number of infinitely flexible services accessible by port interfaces. When we sat down and thought of the way we wanted to put the web together, we wrote a common interfacing language, and ways of accessing that information, by a standard, over the internet. But what we didn't think of was how different the kinds of media transported over the internet would become. Had we thought of it, we might be using blog:// to access blogs today, instead of a certain http address, just as we might be using images:// or video://. Honestly, it shows how well the original system was designed, but then again it also shows how we pretty much stopped designing the system after it solved our problem (same with email, IMO).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Is it irony you are going for?
The link defeats the Firefox pop-up blocker...
Get your Unix fortune now!
Livejournal, for one, has such a setting where your entries are "friends only". Likewise, you can allow people who are anonymous to not post, or otherwise have various restrictions.
This sig no verb.
If you have a few minutes, click on the randomizer button at the top of the screen that reads "Next Blog" a couple of times. I'd be willing to say that at least 2 out of every 10 blogs is a spam farm.
It's just fucking sad.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
All these services like technocrati just measure quantity and not quality. That is why they are so easily spammed and abused. Just by crawling blogs and counting links and cross links won't do it.
And since most bloggers simply recycle and rephrase current events you need a different approach.
I hope it goes where 'cyberspace' and 'surfing' went.
It's pretty easy actually. Write about something other than ****FREE SOFTWARE NOW FOR A GOOD PRICE WINXP WIN2K WIN98 FREE FREE FREE**** and I think you have a pretty good chance of people actually reading your material.
But go ahead, keep on not providing actual content, I'm sure that's a great way to get readers.
"!"
As much as I'd like to believe that learning to code HTML will somehow improve the quality of websites, I know this to be false. Take a look at the old geocities, tripod and angelfire pages. True, many of them were made with the integrated editor, but there are as equally many that were hard coded.
Basically knowing how to write and knowing what to write is not a one-to-one relationship.
Actually, Usenet is doing quite well. The spam battle has been won; there's very little spam in the technical groups. Serious workers in difficult fields are on there. Check out, say, "comp.games.development.programming.algorithms", where the people who write physics engines discuss how to do it. Or "comp.std.c++.moderated", where proposed changes to C++ are discussed. Usenet has far lower advertising content than the Web, where, today, "content" seems to be a little box in the middle of the page, surrounded by blinking ads.
Why should someone have to code a webpage in order to have a blog?
Should a user need to know how to install their operating system in order to use one?
As slashdot geeks we sometimes get narrow minded, but there are different types of intelligence. Just because someone isn't a computer scientist doesnt mean they don't have something interesting to say.
As much as I'd like to believe that learning to code HTML will somehow improve the quality of websites, I know this to be false. Take a look at the old geocities, tripod and angelfire pages. True, many of them were made with the integrated editor, but there are as equally many that were hard coded
That was and is mostly copy and paste.
If a person goes through the trouble of learning to code in a computer language, the likely-hood that their content will be higher quality is better regardless of the hosting company that they use compared to a person who uses a front end or copies other content.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
I use Blogger to manage my blog.
The fact that I know how to enter the necessary information for Blogger to SFTP to my server demonstrates that I am not seeking to link farm.
Bottom line? Educate bloggers on how to integrate with alternative service providers, and aschew blogspot hosted blogs.
The legit will rise to the top, and the rest will be safely ignored.
Why should someone have to code a webpage in order to have a blog? Should a user need to know how to install their operating system in order to use one? As slashdot geeks we sometimes get narrow minded, but there are different types of intelligence. Just because someone isn't a computer scientist doesnt mean they don't have something interesting to say.
Why reply to my post with something that has nothing to do with what I said?
Did I say that someone needs to know how to code HTML to post a blog? No.
Did I say that someone needs to know how to install an operating system to know how to use it? No.
Did I say that someone has to be a computer scientist to have something interesting to say? No.
Please bother to read and absorb a post before replying in a way that has nothing at all to do with what you are replying to.
You don't have to actually read what you reply to, but it would help in the future.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
Perhaps.
But being able to program, and being able to program well are two different things. And even if they become an expert programmer, doesn't mean that they will know how to use it properly.
Someone had to design those Javascript butterflies that follow my cursor around.
And seriously. HTML is not hard at all to learn. Or at least not so hard to learn to be able to put up a web page.
Now we've begun adding "social" in front of all kinds of new web applications. Anything that lets other users see your profile and the items you post and comment on them is seen as a valid replacement for real human contact.
Del.icio.us has none of these features, and the words "social filtering" are not used to imply any sort of substitution of human contact. It is a system where you can file bookmarks and can find the most popular bookmarks as tagged by other users. "Social filtering" is the phrase that has stuck to describe this informal voting system. Feel free to suggest an alternative.
Your complaint about modern technology making a poor substitute for actual human contact may be valid, but really has nothing to do with this story or with del.icio.us.
I suspect you were also as disappointed as I was in school when I found out that "Social Studies" wasn't a place to talk to other students.
You might try writing what you mean, rather than flaming someone for failing to read your mind.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I think you're over-generalizing. Yes, many blogs are indeed vanity projects where people say whatever they feel like about subjects nobody cares about, but there are good, worth-while blogs out there which have nothing to do about vanity.
Developer blogs are one such style of blog, which can be very useful. You can use these types of blogs to get "inside knowledge" on development projects, and get some insight into the developers themselves, while peerhaps learning some interesting tricks and techniques along the way.
You know, I've never understood why some people feel the need to post in their blogs every single day. It's like back in Grade 3, when the teacher insisted we write something in our journals every freaking day (I remember telling my teachers that I had nothing to say. They'd always say that I should write about my morning. But how many times can an 8-year-old kid write "I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and then came to this dump"??? But I digress).
I run a small developer blog that nobody ever visits (well, so far as I know :) ) here, where I talk about Open Source development projects I'm working on, example code in various languages/APIs, comment on tradde shows I attend, etc. But if I have nothing to say for three weeks, I won't post anything for three weeks. If people want to find out when I have something to say, that's what the RSS feed is for. If they want to know what I'm up to between times, they can e-mail me.
So I agree with you on this point. I think that blogs can serve a useful purpose, but if you're writing in your blog just for the sake of writing in your blog, and have nothing useful to say, you should probably take up a new hobby.
Yaz.
I have been coding webpages since March of 1995. I have learned HTML 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and now CSS1.0 and CSS2.0 and... As exciting as all that can be sometimes I just want to post my thoughts and be done with it. There's nothing wrong with efficiency. Blog sites can be great time savers. I used to have a web journal, wrote entries in my Palm Pilot, hotsynced the data to my Mac and ftp'd it onto my server using Applescript - all the while snorting at all the newbies using blog sites. Then I decided I valued my time better. I opened up a blog in January of this year (http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com/ and have had a blast. I post once a week.
Now, my blog isn't going to be popular. I cover mostly neurological problems and how to deal with them. But I've had some fascinating discussions with complete strangers because of my blog and I'll continue blogging into the forseeable future. Because of Google many people find my blog despite it being a small fish in a big and noisy blog sea. Google is a great tool and I'm glad they index blogs. Now, I'm as upset as the next guy about spam blogs, but "crap" blogs are relative. You may read my blog and find it lame. Others, including myself, would disagree with you. But if you don't find the subjects I write about interesting or valuable, so what?
Slashdot cracks me up sometimes. What is it to some of you guys if somebody wants to blather on and on about their breakfast or their boyfriend? If the site is a bore move on, but you could tell that from the Google search, right? Seriously, I haven't found many blogs that come up in my searches that aren't related to my searches. Not as much as parked domain sites and adsense whores at any rate.
Not all bloggers can't be bothered to code a web page. In fact, because I do code I'm able to personalize my site. Every month I tinker and tinker with the code when I find some time. Blogging may be an exercize in vanity, but then so isn't hosting your own website. In fact, the whole web publishing scene is about personal expression, and what's wrong with that?
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
Simple. Have 8 different domains, or even 8 different URLs from the same domain. One backlink for each in the sig. I'll admit to doing this on one particular forum, but it's a web developer's site, and it's a common practice there.
The real solution, at least as far as search engine rank goes is the new rel=nofollow attribute for links that Google started using a few months ago. The best link that I could find when I was looking at this a couple weeks ago is this one. If it grows in popularity and the major forum and blog sites start using it on comments and signatures, the spam in blogs won't be able to affect search results nearly as strongly as they do today. (Unfortunately, readers will still have to skim past the SPAM comments in the victim blogs)
I wish there was a way of stabbing people in the face over the Internet when they use that awful buzzword "blogosphere"!!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
How is this news? And how did they not see this coming? Every single public audience interactive media on the internet thus far has been invaded with spam, ads and other crapware - usenet, irc, email, BBSes, forums, wikis ... Why didn't the blog software writers plan for this when creating their software? Is this not a bit MS-like by putting out software to grab a market and only later bothering with security features?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Trying to view blogspot, and at some point, it harassed me for a login at some point (maybe I wandered in the wrong direction). So I used the firefox BugMeNot plugin, and voila`, I had a blog. Okay, so it was more of a wiki than a blog, I really didn't post anything, and it was always being covered by folks writing crappy poetry.
Then some dweeb from canuckistan changed the password and uses it to boost the google ratings for his pathetic little torontine blog about getting drunk with ron jeremy.
The "random blog" used to show that most of the blogs on blogspot were in fact spam. Where'd that button go?
I just want to point out how much I love Findory. Findory is a website that uses the news stories you clicked on to pick more news stories for you to read, and tends to be very accurate. If you worry about privacy, it even works without a login or cookies, just not as well. Do any Slashdotters use Findory? I just love telling people how much I love using Findory, especially the personalized RSS feeds.
Who is going to pay $1 to read about how your boyfriend dumped you last week and you're still crying in bed
A *lot* of people... and a lot more than $1 too.
Soaps, Reality TV.... Big Brother is the ultimate proof of this - a dozen totally uninteresting people sitting in a room for 2 weeks - gets top rating and is simulcast on 3 channels simultaneously.
Surely it's only a matter of time before we start seeing del.icio.us tags getting link spammed :(
Sometimes, it's just about being nice to people (like if I find a cool site). There's a hope that the right keywords might help someone find something. If you have a look at mine (no, I'm not traffic seeking), you'll see there are all sorts of posts, nearly all about things I've seen or heard, or some political opinions.
Seems like a reasonable way to do it to me. (Cue Rob rushing out the door to the patent office)
Allow users to directly rate the worth of the sites Google returns in a search. Anything from "Not what I was looking for", "This is a crap site", "Nothing but advertising" to "This is probably illegal".
It would give Google direct stats on the worth of the sites. People marking competitors down could be made difficult through techniques like character recognition.
Deleted
We then get to the huge problem. How do you measure quality? In fact, what is quality? I think slashdot karma is a good attempt at it.
Deleted
Like email spam, these sites will continue to exist so long as people click on the links, thus supporting the business model.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
The description from my WebHashcash site:
WebHashcash is a Java-based anti-spam mechanism for collaborative web sites such as weblogs, discussion forums, and wikis, to guard against automated content posting, fake user registration, or ballot stuffing. It adapts the Hashcash email anti-spam system to web forms.
Hashcash is a system designed in 1997 by Adam Back whereby all messages require a modest investment of CPU power in order to generate a "stamp" which will be accepted by the recipient. The CPU processing happens transparently before the user even tries to send his message, and it usually doesn't take more than a few seconds. Thus, a small and easily-verified "postage" is attached to all messages. This cost is negligible for legitimate users, but prohibitive for spammers, thereby destroying the economics of spamming.
Click here to view instructions for installation onto your web site.
David Schneider-Joseph
It's called "using my brain/eyes" and "communicating with people".
;)
On sites that I already know and like (including some blogs), people mention and link to other sites, like, say, blogs. Since I then go over there for real content, well, guess what, it's not a link farm; it's good.
Problem solved
Who is going to pay $1 to read about how your boyfriend dumped you last week and you're still crying in bed.
No, but I bet there's a nerd market for the contact details of chicks on the rebound.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
But I have a LiveJournal. So do a lot of my friends from high school and college. I can easily read up on their lives by reading my friends page, and they can do the same, and we can all comment on each other. It's put me back in touch with people I hadn't talked to in months.
I'm also a member of several LJ communities. These aren't much different from traditional message boards, but because I can view them in my friends list as well, I get everything integrated into one place. It's more convenient than checking five different message boards about various topics.
That's why I use blogs.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
I manage to make myself heard in the "cacophony of spam blogs"; maybe that's just because I've got friends who are interested in me. Do you not tell your friends what you've been up to, or do you keep it to yourself?
How is making comments not also demanding attention? Couldn't you have written this on a piece of paper to keep under your pillow, rather than posting here and demanding that everyone see it? Imagine having to make yourself heard in the cacophony of Slashdot posters...
This has happened with almost all technology, from Email to Websites to Forums to anything.
Derive Politics
Am I the only one who find the term "blogosphere" almost as annoying as "cyberspace" and "e-{insert whatever word you want here}"?
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
You can't stop the signal.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
The verification of a user account needs only happen once. There is a free UNIX host that does this, and there are a few of online games that essentially take a one time fee. I think that a lot of people would be willing to slap an actual dollar in an envelope and send it.
99.9% of blogs are crap by people who can't bother to code an web page.
Well, yes. But Sturgeon's Law is that 99% of everything is crap, so blogs are only a tenth as likely to be any good. And given how many of them there are, that means that probably most of the useful information on the internet is on one...
Seriously, though, there are good blogs and bad blogs. Find the right blogs and you've got a lot of very interesting reading ahead of you.
Last I checked it was a penny for your thoughts, at most just two cents, now you're telling me you want to charge a DOLLAR!?
Well, yes, but you'll understand that we haven't raised the price of thoughts for nearly 200 years now (2c is the price of a thought at the moment, a penny is merely their redemption value after use -- thought recycling is important for the environment). This rise is merely in line with inflation, and you've benefited from cheap thoughts in the meantime.
Google for "new idria, ca"
The first link *is* relevant, and maybe 2 more on the first Google page are as well.
The rest? PURE CRAP. Lawyers in New Idria, CA? Job listings? Home appraisals? All just SPAM.
(FYI, New Idria, CA is a ghost town. It has a population of 3. There are no homes being sold, and thank god, no lawyers there either.)
So, I was looking for further history & photos and I was flooded with marketing garbage. Take a look at some of the URLs. It's clear that they're trying to boost their rank based on city names and not actually relevant content.
The web was around long before blogs. Google was necessary, successful and incredibly useful long before blogs.
Blogs are fine. But 99% of the time, they are useless to me when I'm searching for something. I'm often after technical data or reviews, and blogs are not usually the best source, or the best venue, for such things.
This is just one more argument for not having all tehse srevices be free.
If people had to pay even a nominal fee ($12/year) the majority of the spam blogs would disappear. And probably 90% of the crap blogs, too. They'd either quit because it's not worth the cost, or (in a minority of cases) they'd actually start thinking more before blogging (which has to be one of the stupidest words of the last 100 years, right up there with "bling-bling").
Even the most talented bloggers don't always have something interesting to post. Which is the main reason for a daily aggregate blog site like ...
http://www.blogspy.net/ (shameless plug :) )
No. They can censor all they want. Freedom of Speech is something that the government cannot infringe on. Individuals can infringe all they want. As long as I can get the information elsewhere and not through the almighty google, no right has been violated.
click me
I started the new one at Modblogs, and have had much better luck. Mainly, I just post the code at the one there - shell scripts and programs and such.
The rub is, while I would love it if everybody could screen out the garbage, I post (or at least try to post) informative articles - howtos, tips and tricks, guides, simple programs in various languages - and people looking for that particular solution have to be able to find it. The catch 22 turns out that search engines drop the index of my blog regularly, and when they pick it up again, people get all the spam in their search.
The solution is, of course, for people to maintenence their own site. Slashdot manages to screen out bots. Many bulletin boards do so. It's not rocket science. I picked blogs because they were a free web presence alternative to a paid site, without the "free web page" hassles of making my readers look at annoying ad banners and pop-ups. If any body out there has alternative ideas, I'm all ears. It does look like Blogspot has gone from bad to worse to panned out entirely.
Blogebrity could run an unlinked z-list.
Honestly, though, this is one real reason for A-lists.
Just another reason for me not to allow comments on my BLog. I really don't need some scumbag spammer trying to pitch their product on my BLog. I look forward to the day when the patriot act allows us to throw spammers in camp Gitmo. Oh wait, that would be too merciful. How about we just declare them an enemy of the state and shoot them on site.
Sorry, couldn't help myself
I do love "!" but not as much as I love "..."...
OK. This is pretty lame, but it must be posted:
I do not like weblogs and spam.
I do not like them RAM-I-am.
Do not like them here or there
I do not like them anywhere.
Not on a site, nor click with a mouse
Not here or there, not anywhere
I do not like weblogs and spam
I do not like them, RAM-I-am
Could you? Would you? With a goatse.cx?
Could you? Would you? On a VPN?
Could you? Would you? Behind a firewall?
Could you? Would you? On a wi-fi?
Not with a goatse.cx. Not on a VPN.
Not behind a firewall. Not on a wi-fi.
Not on a site. Nor click with a mouse.
Oh, no!
Not in a linux box. Not with firefox.
Not in a B-tree. You let me be!
I do not like weblogs and spam!
I do not like them, RAM-I-am!
I do not like weblogs and spam!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
I'm just in the middle of launching an easy-to-use outsourced CAPTCHA system at http://botblock.com/ - we'll be evolving it rapidly to try and make it easy as pie for web admins to block comment spam in an outsourced way. The difference between this and piece of software you download for your blog is that A) you don't need server access to use BotBlock and B) we can evolve BotBlock to use increasingly sophisticated CAPTCHAs without requiring website operators to change anything. I've already deployed it on my personal blog and gotten commentspams down to zero per week from several hundred a week. I'd love to hear what folks think.
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
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