Splogs Clog Blog Services

SuperWebTech writes "A new generation of spam has emerged lately in the form of automatically-created spam blogs, or "splogs." One wily programmer manipulated Blogger's API to create a "spamalanche" of thousands of blogs whose sole purpose was to increase their real sites' pagerank. This clogged search engine results while filling RSS feed services with useless listings. Though Google, Blogger's owner, is doing its best to fix the problem, in the meantime several services have stopped listing any site they host. So far nobody has found a solution."

Comments

Well let's get old fashioned

[Xarius]

So far nobody has found a solution.

Use the same solution you do in the real world when a person or group starts spouting off nonsensical crap.

Ignore them.

P.S. stop relying on google so much, PageRank is obviously flawed if it can be so easily manipulated by spamtards.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[aussie_a]

P.S. stop relying on google so much, PageRank is obviously flawed if it can be so easily manipulated by spamtards.

Do you have any alternate search engines (preferably with examples to prove that they're actually better) to use instead of google? I've tested out all the big names, and the results I get are almost always near-identical, with the small differences in the results returned not being that important.

It is extremely frustrating when Google returns nothing useful, but I've yet to find a search engine that works better. Google's level of results seems to be the best anyone can achieve at the moment (and it's not really google that's setting the level of excellence).

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[LiquidCoooled]

I think google and the other search engines should start paying MUCH more attention to the bigname social bookmarking sites.

Taking the ranking power away from the webmaster and putting it back in the hands of the user would be a good thing and could help to mitigate these kind of abuses.

Since the links are identified based on the audience percieved popularity we could see better results.
Of course, any system can be gamed, but having the power to meta moderate the results helps with this.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[Anonymous Coward]

"Taking the ranking power away from the webmaster and putting it back in the hands of the user would be a good thing and could help to mitigate these kind of abuses."

Have you seen Digg.com? It's a perfect example that most of the time putting things into the hands of the users just leads to complete garbage. Most people are very stupid and can be manipulated a lot easier than any technological solution that's well thought out.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[jalefkowit]

Yahoo have been investing a lot in improving their search results, and I've found them to be as good as (or even, in some cases, better than) Google for everyday use. Your mileage may vary, of course...

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[LiquidCoooled]

The sites linked in digg may be purile and occasionally boring, but are listed based upon popularity.
Just because YOU don't like the content doesn't mean its shit.

How many pure advertising (that aren't marked as such) or fake links do you see hitting the front page?

Social bookmarking takes a large section of available content and manually cuts through the shite leaving the gems - whether its a commercial site, or a personal blog it doesn't matter as long as it hits the spot and does the job.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[vertinox]

It is extremely frustrating when Google returns nothing useful, but I've yet to find a search engine that works better. Google's level of results seems to be the best anyone can achieve at the moment (and it's not really google that's setting the level of excellence).

Most of the time Google does find revalent things when you can't make money off the subject of what you are searching for, but when you can then you always end up with one group or another trying to get the highest page rank when obiviously they have little use for whatever you are searching for.

Personally, I wish Google would have a reporting or moderation feature in which you could report bad searches to google and after 10,000 unique IPs reported "THIS SITE IS CRAP" or "THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SEARCH" then google will remove or demote their rankings.

This of course could be abused by people who have bot nets and report their competitors in the searches as useless pages, but I think that would be a rare exception for most sites.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[lamz]

Here's my solution. Charge $1 to open a new blog account. It's still basically free for anyone who wants an account, but prohibitively expensive for spammers who want thousands of accounts.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[Anonymous Coward]

While Google is the *best* commercial search engine it completely ignores the most useful information that can be found through the "Invisible Web" research.

Sure if you wanna find this or that web site or quick info, Google is great. But when you want to find something truly meaningful that you can use as reference, try http://lii.org/ or http://dmoz.org./ Of course this requires subject search (much like going to the library) and recognizing the set of terms you want to find. I just discovered http://www.factbites.com/ is a decent search engine Web site that digs through other "invisible web" sites to deliver results.

People really have to get out of this "Google or bust" mentality if they want to get any real research done.

If you're *really* desperate for a commercial search engine, just go with www.dogpile.com it compiles searches from yahoo, google, jeeves and MSN Search.

ps: PageRank flaws are considered "GoogleHoles" coined by Steven Johnson
http://slate.msn.com/id/2085668/

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[toad3k]

I wish I could simply ban certain domains from my search, ie ign owned sites, experts exchange or whatever it is called, etc. If I had to login to make this happen, I would happily. After a few thousand users start reporting the same sites over and over again the obvious move is to start demoting them. An infinite number of algorithms could be run on accounts to flag trustworthiness.

That would cause commercial sites to drop like flies, making google ads more valuable, and it would definitely differentiate google from the other engines.

I'm sure they've thought of this and decided it wasn't worth a go.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[FLEB]

Through what medium? Credit cards? There are a whole lot of folks online who are under 18 and can't get a card. For everyone else, it's past the threshold of inconvenience, and the practice just screams "scam". For any business based on gaining viewers and subscribers, this would be a shot in the foot.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh... it's a step in the right direction. Clusty is more or less my backup search engine when I can't trick Google into giving me what I want.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[LocoMan]

You can already. Just add -site:(URL here without the ()'s) at the end of the search, as many as sites you want not to be listed in the results... :)

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[jcr]

Through what medium? Credit cards?

Credit card, PayPal, mail in a check, whatever you like. You could even make it refundable after six months or a year.

-jcr

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[ergo98]

I think google and the other search engines should start paying MUCH more attention to the bigname social bookmarking sites.

You have got to be kidding.

If people want to do the herd thing, they can go to those social bookmarking sites and skip search engines altogether. As it is I find most of the content there (speaking of delicious) to be absolutely terrible, superficial trash. Just because a group of people with a herd mentality all groupthink some trivial, superficial piece up doesn't mean that it's a valuable contribution (it's like getting Score:5 on here - there are a couple of terribly easy ways to get it everytime if you want).

Of course, any system can be gamed, but having the power to meta moderate the results helps with this.

A site like delicious is HUGELY gameable (and as it gains actual importance outside of the herd, it _IS_ being gamed. The evidence is overwhelming). Until we have a real, one-person-one-internet-identity system, that will be the way it remains.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[himself]

Through any damn medium I want!

I opened a LibraryThing account last month, and I mailed the guy a ten-spot in an envelope. In fact, I sent him an email to that effect and he approved my account immediately! Did I use Paypal? No, thanks, I save more time NOT sorting through all the Phishing emails than I could conceivably save making electronic payments. How about a credit card? He doesn't take them because He's Just This Guy, You Know? But good old folding money did the trick.

Would I mail someone a dollar? You bet, it's the closest to a micropayment I'll ever get -- but the same kind of process that uses it as a gating mechanism won't trust me to put it in the mail, so it fails.

Now, I am willing to do st00pid, repetitive things several times (like decipher a captcha), but that's been pooh-pooh'ed in another post.

Back to the drawing board, I guess...

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[Retric]

Or, you can do use the hole "What does {***} say", where {***) is a picture of some word.

The problem with such systems is page rank is fairly sensitive so 1000 blog act's would still let you noticeably alter a page ranks so a spammer could can setup up a ~1000 accounts in an afternoon (3per min over 6 hours). Thus, if they can make a few 100$ from doing so it's still worth it.

Your system has a similar problem. If someone steals a few thousand Credit Card #'s it's hard to use them in a way that will not get tracked back to them, but if they can use them to setup a few thousand blog's they can step around your system. To create some accounts that they can sell to a spammer.

Basically, anything that makes your system more secure increases the value a spammer would receive from having an account on your system. So at best you can setup a black market for accounts on your system with a cost per act that keeps most spammers from using your system.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[Anonymous Coward]

I am going to have to completely concur for now.... I mean look at slashdot when that spamtard Cliff started posting stupid crap my brain created an automatic filter an now after just a simple glance at the headline I can bounce right over his worthless drivel...

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[FLEB]

Credit card

Age limit.

PayPal

Age limit.

mail in a check, whatever you like.

Disproportionately inconvenient (for both sides) solution to the problem at hand.

You could even make it refundable after six months or a year.

Not likely, I'd say. By the time transaction fees take a bite both ways, a small sum is reduced to near-nothing anyway.

Re:Well let's get old fashioned

[drsquare]

Age limit.

Do we want the Internet clogged up with blogs by 15 year olds whining about irrelevent shit? I always said there should be an age limit on the Internet.

Username trend?

[sethadam1]

Anyone else notice that every username in the video is [letters]-[numbers].blogspot.com.

Maybe start by disabling new blogs.
Flag all usernames that meet that basic regex criteria.
Hand filter that bunch.
Add the same captcha you have on your comment system to the posting system.
Re-enable registration.

Seems kind of elementary, doesn't it? Why not try it?

Re:Username trend?

[De Lemming]

Flag all usernames that meet that basic regex criteria.

With all the efforts spammers do to avoid baisian filtering on e-mail, don't you think they will change their username format to something else half an hour after you implement this regex? Probably to something more variable (and dictionary based).

Hand filter that bunch.

And hand filtering thousands of blogs which are created automatically does not seem feasible...

Re:Username trend?

[Otter]

Well, that'll work today. Then tomorrow the sploggers* will catch on and use more complex names, and Blogger will be stuck with that now-useless cruft forever.

* I hate most blogoneologisms, but kind of like this one. Can we look forward to splogcasts in the future?

Re:Username trend?

[De Lemming]

That should read "Bayesian filtering" of course.

Re:Username trend?

[sethadam1]

don't you think they will change their username format to something else half an hour after you implement this regex?

Yes, but they'll have to contend with the captcha system, which is far more difficult. The name pattern is just to id the initial set to review, not a permanent thing.

And hand filtering thousands of blogs which are created automatically does not seem feasible...

Bah. Google has plenty of cash. They could hire temps to do it and knock it out in a few days.

Re:Username trend?

[Dr. Evil]

The catpcha system is an interesting problem but not insurmountable. The third-world anti-captcha sweatshop seems like a pretty tricky thing to circumvent.

...advertising also has the advantage of placement v.s. cost. They can charge more to advertise if the medium is more expensive to advertise in.

Re:Username trend?

[Mr Z]

Splogcasts? Good gawd... it'll be the Internet equivalent of the breathless, low quality ads you hear if you ever venture onto the AM dial, only instead being about vitamin C and adjustable beds, it'll be about online pharmacies, penis enlargment and porn. (Would that be the three Ps of online spam?)

Splogs? Seriously wtf

[ponds]

With the Splogosphere maturing, we can expect to see Splogcasts in the near future.

It's Obvious Day at Slashdot

[AEton]

Google, Blogger's owner, is doing its best to fix the problem

Really? I hadn't heard :p

Re:It's Obvious Day at Slashdot

[KidHash]

That story is about comment spam, where as this is about people creating spam blogs

In case you still can't see, that makes the two things completely different..

So far nobody has found a solution.

[archeopterix]

And yet... a default of ref=nofollow for all user links seems to be a good start. Ok, ok, inconvenient, valuable links will be lost forever, yada, yada, yada. Only until a better solution is found and even until then it's better than the spam hell.

Re:So far nobody has found a solution.

[Hynee]

How would useful links be lost forever? Yeah, they wouldn't have their PageRank increased, whereas by rights they should be counted if they are a truly useful and relevant link entered by a blog responder, but at least the URL is out there, and the link will find its way into non-blog reply pages (without the rel="nofollow" attribute).

Re:So far nobody has found a solution.

[dragon_imp]

Blocking links in "user links" doesn't work -- the story is about spam blogs, not comment-spam on blogs.

These guys have figured out how to leverage a few carefully chosen lines of code into a hughe moneymaker. Or, it will be until Google figures out how to block the automation.

Hint: Google -- try changing the interface -- that ought to break the program for a while. Require visual confirmations. Require "enter your valid email and click on the link we send you. Try any of the techniques used by any everyday forum software to block automated postings. Who knows -- they might work for you, too!

Re:So far nobody has found a solution.

[Midnight Thunder]

On other solution would be to make it so you either have to log in to see where the URLs point to or using javascript to open the links. Yet another idea would simply to disable content links when Googlebot visits.

Word verification?

[badasscat]

Wouldn't a simple word verification requirement when creating a blog cure this? I don't think many people would bother creating "thousands" of new splogs if they knew they needed to manually enter in user data for each one... why should you even be able to start up a blog using an API?

Blogger already requires word verification for posting comments (if the blog admin turns it on) - am I missing something or would this also work to at least alleviate the splog problem too?

Re:Word verification?

[Bogtha]

Wouldn't a simple word verification requirement when creating a blog cure this?

Yes and no. CAPTCHAs solve the problem for things like Slashdot, where you just have to worry about trolls with too much time on their hands. But when it comes to spam, there's a value to beating them, so what some enterprising spammers do is set up porn sites that tell people "enter the word you see here and get free porn!". Lots of horny geeks do the spammers' work for them. The difference between the two scenarios is that the spammers are willing to pay minute amounts to beat the CAPTCHAs, but the trolls aren't.

Re:Word verification?

[Myself]

If someone's willing to pay for a higher search ranking, the spammer can pay humans to beat the CAPTCHAs. I can see it now, a sweatshop in a low-wage country with hundreds of workers monotonously typing in the text from the skewed and scrambled images.

There's also PWNTcha, a CAPTCHA decoder. (Previously slashdotted.)

Re:Word verification?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my recent experience, they (Blogspot) have been springing CAPCHAs on the actual article-submission page now and then. This may be triggered by spammy-looking content -- and the vast majority of my blog entries look spammy because I document my incoming spam that way! I defang any HTML HREFs, though, so it's not like I'm deliberately contributing to the pagerank problem. My main reason for posting spam in the blog is so that people who wonder "is this spam?" and search for the spam text can find "yep -- I got it too -- and it's evil, so don't believe anything it says."

Meanwhile, I'm twiddling my thumbs and writing extra bull here because Slashdot insists I'm not allowed to submit this because it's only been fifteen minutes since my last posting. I'm going to give up on the idea of posting here -- life's too short for this crap.

Re:Word verification?

[Anonymous Coward]

But then, wouldn't something like mod_rewrite be useful to stop the images being loaded on those porn sites?

Re:Word verification?

[ArsenneLupin]

The difference between the two scenarios is that the spammers are willing to pay minute amounts to beat the CAPTCHAs, but the trolls aren't.

OTOH, trolls are smart, whereas spammers aren't. If spammers were smart we'd see lots more linkspam in ASP and Coldfusion sites.

Vulnerable ASP sites exist in the millions, and candidates can be found easily using a simple google search...

However, most of these sites are pretty obscure, and an ASP site is not worthwhile for a troll if it is too low-profile (indeed, what good is a goatse if nobody sees it?). For a spammer, OTOH, a reference is a reference. Even a low-profile ASP site counts towards pagerank. Moreover the less well visited it is, the less likely the spam will be seen and brought to the attention of the site operator. Not to mention that spam on ASP sites might be mistaken for legitimate ads added by the site's owner!

Case in point: do you notice anything special about this site? Hint: the extra sentence has been there for a couple of months already... (Sorry for the French text, but the two important words are understandable for English speakers as well)...

Re:Word verification?

[Bogtha]

No, because the spammers can just copy the image to their own host and serve it from there. It would increase their operating costs marginally, but not so much as to make the scheme infeasible, I think.

Re:Word verification?

[Anonymous Coward]

> The difference between the two scenarios is that the spammers are willing to pay minute amounts to beat the CAPTCHAs, but the trolls aren't.

I'm bored, so if I had a way to change my IP quickly, I'd spam the hell out of this thread just to prove you wrong. Unfortunately, slashdot only lets me post one every 15 minutes. :-(

/me posting anonymously for obvious reasons

Re:Word verification?

[Salamanders]

Has anyone actually encountered this CAPTCHA farming?

Re:Word verification?

[klaun]

comes to spam, there's a value to beating them, so what some enterprising spammers do is set up porn sites that tell people "enter the word you see here and get free porn!". Lots of horny geeks do the spammers' work for them. The difference between the two scenarios is that the spammers are willing to pay minute

I've seen this mentioned a lot but haven't ever actually seen a porn site that does this. Can you please provide some references? Because I really want to know if this is something that actually happens as opposed to just being an Internet myth... and I'd like someplace that gave out free porn for filling in CAPTCHAs.

Re:Word verification?

[fm6]

OTOH, trolls are smart, whereas spammers aren't.

Yeah, right. It takes a lot of brains to sit around making lame comments. Whereas designing software to defeat spam filters and CAPCHAs requires no brain power at all.

Re:Word verification?

[1u3hr]

some enterprising spammers do is set up porn sites that tell people "enter the word you see here and get free porn!". Lots of horny geeks do the spammers' work for them.

Really? How do you know this? I know the idea has been proposed and is mentioned quite often, but if you can't give a URL for a captcha-porn site, I must conclude that this is still an urban legend.

Re:Word verification?

[lewp]

I was wondering that, as well. I've seen so many articles describing it, but nobody's ever actually provided an example. I understand the desire not to give these people more exposure, but the more it's mentioned without an example the more I think it's just an urban legend.

If anyone has an example, I'd love to be proven wrong, because it seems viable enough.

Re:Word verification?

[Ryan Amos]

OTOH, trolls are smart, whereas spammers aren't. If spammers were smart we'd see lots more linkspam in ASP and Coldfusion sites.

Common misconception. Spammers are usually very smart, but they were tempted to the dark side by the wads and wads of quick cash available by spamming.

And trolls usually aren't very smart either, they're just bored.

Re:Word verification?

[m0rph3us0]

I used to work for a company that paid people to manually post these spam comments. This was back in early 2000 though and the spam comments were for a pump and dump stock scam. (At least, for the day I worked there this is what I figured out).

Re:Word verification?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, man! FUCK YOU!

They deserve it

[Anonymous Coward]

Any trend that has added so much crap to the English language deserves what it gets. After reading the "words" blog, splogsplosion, splog, and spamalanche, I must take a shower.

Re:They deserve it

[Iriel]

On a serious note, while no search engine should just give away their secrets (if they want to stay popular anyway), I think the mystique that is "Page Rank" (spooky echo) has sort of made Google semi-responsible for a lot of the spam on the net. Do you see anyone making stupid pages (and words) like slogs to exploit Yahoo's results? How about MSN?

Heck, I'm a web developer for a company getting regular complaints that my efforts aren't giving the company site a better PR, and I have to explain that it could take months for any differences to manifest. In this kind of environment, I can easily conceive self-proclaimed SEO 'experts' touting to optimize a site for Google, get paid and leave. When no results show up in 4-6 months "I'm sorry, Google just announced that they changed their page rank system to combat spam pages and links. (Ha ha, you paid me to do something that becomes irrelevant when Google updates their server/engine)"

The struggle to be king of the PR mountain has brought about many corrupt things. Silly words that belong in a children's book being pretty low in that pile.

Re:They deserve it

[K.B.Zod]

I'm with you. It really should have been "exsplogsion".

Re:They deserve it

[generic-man]

Sure. Back before Google was the only search engine, Yahoo and Altavista results got incredibly polluted with people who performed keyword spamming. They never addressed the problem and instead decided to de-emphasize search in favor of becoming all-things-to-all-people "portals."

If Google doesn't want to avoid the same path*, they should stop playing with JavaScript and get back to their search engine work.

* Not like that's horrible; Yahoo is still enormously profitable and successful today

Would explain...

[StephanTual]

... much hyped statistics like 'a new blog created every 2 seconds'.

And this should be a surprise because....

[scronline]

We've already seen how well google handles spamvertising. Google search has become almost completely worthless for the average user, and difficult at best for an advanced user because there's so many "black hat" sites that hit the first page and they haven't been able to anything about that, why would it be any different for other product/services they offer.

So far nobody has found a solution.

[Threni]

> Though Google, Blogger's owner, is doing its best to fix the problem, in the
> meantime several services have stopped listing any site they host. So far nobody
> has found a solution."

What do you mean? That's the perfect solution!

This is what Google Blogs if for...

[michaelzhao]

Google has recently announced an idea that would benefit bloggers. The idea is to have a separate blog search similar to sites like "Technorati". At first glance, this benefits bloggers. However, it benefits Google even more. By having Blog searches separate, they can significantly cut down on Google-Bombing. Google-Bombing really screws with their search algorithms.

I think this may be the beginning of a wholehearted launch of "Google Blog". This issue has also been reported on the "TWiT Podcast" hosted by Leo Laporte. I can't remember which episode number it is, but if you search iTunes podcasts database, you should be able to find it.

Example of Google-Bombing. Go to Google and search "Miserable Failure" and hit "I Feel Lucky". Regardless of what your opinions are. That type of behavior is still wrong.

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[Jupix]

I think this may be the beginning of a wholehearted launch of "Google Blog".

Bloogle?

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[rob_squared]

You're right, it's not funny, it's accurate.

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[Mr_Icon]

There's some very powerful irony in the fact that by clicking on "I feel lucky" you get to "George W Bush".

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[brentodd]

Example of Google-Bombing. Go to Google and search "Miserable Failure" and hit "I Feel Lucky". Regardless of what your opinions are. That type of behavior is still wrong.

Now I understand why http://www.asshat.org/ has that Miserable Failure link at the bottom of the page.

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[maxpublic]

Example of Google-Bombing. Go to Google and search "Miserable Failure" and hit "I Feel Lucky". Regardless of what your opinions are. That type of behavior is still wrong.

It's funny. And a perfect example of the beauty of the First Amendment.

Max

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[imroy]

Go to Google and search "Miserable Failure" and hit "I Feel Lucky". Regardless of what your opinions are. That type of behavior is still wrong.

Right. People exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression and peaceful protest is wrong. You little facists are what's wrong with the US today.

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[michaelzhao]

My little fascists? I'm not saying the freedom of expression is wrong... I am saying that type of behavior completely messes up the Google search results. RTFP and STFU. People like you is what is wrong with Slashdot today.

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[imroy]

I am saying that type of behavior completely messes up the Google search results.

Ok, sure. But who types "miserable failure" into Google and hits "I'm feeling lucky" expecting useful results? In fact, I think that button is there largely for its entertainment value. I've never used it for searious searching. The only use I could think of is to get around some sort of locked-down kiosk-like web terminal. If they provide a link to Google, then you can put in the title of the desired web site and hit "I'm feeling lucky" to go straight to it. If you're lucky...

Sorry for calling you a facist. With that comment you made, I thought you were one of the growing hoardes of brainwashed idiots who think "patriotism" means blindy supporting everything done by the Bush administration. I misinterpreted your terse explaination and overreacted.

Re:This is what Google Blogs if for...

[michaelzhao]

Thanks... I really don't like to be called a fascist and I'm definitely not one to blindly support any president with a thin veil of false patriotism.

Wily programmer?

[Anonymous Coward]

When one can't come up with ways to contribute something useful (much harder), is this the result?

Managed RSS feeds are more interesting

[tcopeland]

i.e., Artima's Ruby Buzz and Java Buzz, Planet PostgreSQL and so forth.

Of course, those become less valuable when folks add RSS feeds that aren't specific to the topic, so that Java posts show up in the Ruby feeds and all that. That can be tricky too, though; does this post go under Jabber or PostgreSQL? Dunno.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[theantipop]

It's ok. It's hard to create a new buzzword these days. Acronymns are old news. For example, which sounds better: PIN or Perdenum? I rest my case.

Capcha?

[wren337]

Isn't this the kind of automation prevention problem that capchas can solve reasonably well? Put image-text verificaiton on each step of creating or appending to a blog. If nothing else it will slow them down. Am I missing something?

Re:Capcha?

[m50d]

It pisses off legitimate users and is no good for disabled people/lynx zealots. I've had to use the insecure bookmarked-login thing to read /. lately.

Re:Capcha?

[Cramer]

Capchas don't solve anything. 90% of them are easily decoded by software. (Software made them, software can decode them.) And as others love to point out, there are ways to get actual people to decode them for you. [However, I've never seen actual evidence of one of the "pr0n traps".]

The only thing that appears to work is charging for new accounts. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it will drive some, otherwise legit, people away (because they don't use online payment systems, etc., etc.) And yes, it's a hassle for the site. But, aside from stolen credit cards, there's no getting around it. (And very few spammers are willing to commit credit card fraud to increase their pagerank.)

Re:Capcha?

[British]

I wonder what would happen if IP addresses were posted on EVERY comment. Yes, EVERY comment.
Gave a bigger site like blogger.com have a record of each IP address that comments. If people start reporting spam comments and enough of them are tied to one IP address, block that IP address out from anything in the future.

Abuse on the internet has to come in from somewhere. Why not cast a net, find out which blocks it is, and choke it from there, forever? Don't ask nicely, don't give a 24 hour warning. Just block it forever.

Re:Capcha?

[m50d]

Because then the poor next person to get that dynamic IP can't use your site, and the guy who did the spamming just disconnects and reconnects and starts going again. Once IPv6 comes in ISPs might give static IPs to everyone, but at the moment there's no way that'll happen. And even then you have people getting viruses and becoming accidental open proxies, unsecured wireless connections, friends coming around, and so on. A site that followed your policies would just lose too many legitimate users.

Re:Capcha?

[LiquidCoooled]

No way would I like that.
Not one little bit.

Consider the following very general situation:
Spammer uses home ISP connection with connection time allocated dynamic IP.
Spammer sends out thousands until blocked.
Spammer reconnects and gets a new IP whilst the original one is reusable by someone else.
You or I then connect and unfortunately get the old IP and cant access the service any more.

BTW, Its already in practice here on slashdot.
Post too many fucked up comments and your IP banned from posting.

Please Type the characters that you see on this...

[bahwi]

picture, print that document out, attach it with your photo ID, and fax it to (800) Goo-gle1

Charitable donation

[Honkytonkwomen]

Simple: Just require a small donation to charity (through Paypal?) before they can create a blog. A dollar or two shouldn't matter to anyone who's putting up a real blog, but will deter sploggers.

Re:Charitable donation

[88NoSoup4U88]

Keep in mind that not everyone has access to paypal/online payment forms : I -do- like your idea though, as, what you said, 2 dollars for a 'lifetime subscription' wouldn't matter much.

Re:Charitable donation

[mikeboone]

Then the splog people would just get connected with the phishing people (if they haven't already). They'll clean out someone's Paypal account and post a few hundred splogs. :(

Re:Charitable donation

[sinserve]

Money is traceable, and not many internet users want to be traced. [insert obvious Freedom-Fighter argument here].

Re:Charitable donation

[gid]

But at if they clean out someone's paypal account, then the spamming turns into a real crime that can be punished. I'd bet some spammers aren't yet ready to upgrade to outright stealing.

Re:Charitable donation

[orkysoft]

Yes, and those two bucks will also be very affordable for poor people in third world countries. They'll just have to go a day without food, no problem!

Re:Charitable donation

[Fex303]

Yes, and those two bucks will also be very affordable for poor people in third world countries. They'll just have to go a day without food, no problem!

Well, if they're spending all their time surfing the net and sitting in front of their computers then no wonder they're living below the poverty line.

No priorities, that's their problem. They spend all their money on a PCI-E graphics card and then can't afford rice to feed their child...

Re:Charitable donation

[orkysoft]

So according to you, poor people shouldn't be able to go to a cyber cafe to post to their blog? I never implied that these poor people would have their own computer -- they're too poor, that's the entire point!

Re:Charitable donation

[deblau]

On the other hand, it doesn't prevent someone from using a competitor who doesn't charge. And it's a bar to free speech.

Re:Charitable donation

[gregor-e]

A good idea for most, but some bloggers would really find that onerous. For example: http://bahatia.blogspot.com/ is a blog for Bahatia Community Centre, who only have a website because it is free. (A dollar is an average day's wage for many over there).

Re:Charitable donation

[geoffspear]

Please give me the root password to your machine. I want to use it to host a website. Failure to do so infringes upon my right to free speech.

You have no right to have your speech hosted for free. Having the government impose a fee for bloggers would be a violation of free speech rights. Google/Blogspot doing it wouldn't.

Re:Charitable donation

[aesiamun]

And what are people in 3rd world countries who can't eat food if they spend two dollars doing on computers, internet service and blogging?

I am not part of the "blogosphere" but comeon ... at what point does an american company give two shits about some south african person who wants a blog? This is google, and if they can make a big difference in their spam handling by charging $1-2 per account, they owe it to their stock holders to do this.

As it is now, Blogs from Blogspot are useless

Re:Charitable donation

[foniksonik]

Are there many 3rd world people blogging who can't afford this? IF so, then a charity could set up a paypal account for them and throw in $100 bucks to get them started in their new blogging careers and just replenish it every 3 months or so for those who indeed do have something to say.

Re:Charitable donation

[RoboPimp_3000]

People who are so poor that spending a couple dollars means going two days without food, go into cyber cafes to post to their blogs? And Google should think about these people if they implement any donation scheme? I really don't understand your point, or how your original post was modded Insightful.

(As an aside, these are probably the people who could benefit from donations to charity... )

Re:Charitable donation

[orkysoft]

Hey, I happen to think the vast majority of blogs are useless, alright? But if people want to blog, why put those kinds of roadblocks in their way? Also, charging money, regardless of the amount, means that the bloggers can't be anonymous anymore. Big issue in some countries.

I'd still like it to be possible to exclude all blogs in web searches, though...

Re:Charitable donation

[deblau]

You have no right to have your speech hosted for free.

True, but that won't stop people from giving Google a PR black eye if Google takes away their 'free' speech. AFAIK, Google hasn't done very much to piss people off yet. People choose other companies, but not because 'Google is evil.' If they put a fee on Blogger, people will start talking.

Couple of solutions?

[keraneuology]

How about a spider-readable timestamp for blogs? If 5,000 new blogs pop up within 12 hours of each other linking to the same web page it is an obvious red flag.

On top of this, once again the hosting services need to be held responsible: if a site is hosting an obviously spamvertised site then give them 24 hours to remove the site or be blocked from future indexing activities - and have current rankings deleted.

Re:Couple of solutions?

[David Off]

Google's recent patent covers just this area, obviously they don't eat their own sh*t.

Damn Blog Hogs, Go swim in a Bog

[slicer622]

I feel like I'm in a fog, without a seeing eye dog. What a sog! Burninate, Trog! Jeremiah was a bullfrog, but there was a server backlog. And that was just the prologue. Later we took a jog to get some egg nog. Just make sure to oil the cog. I know its a slog, but its better than smog. Thats the end of this log.

Re:Damn Blog Hogs, Go swim in a Bog

[Rocketship Underpant]

You deserve to be flogged and drowned in grog! I am truly agog. Well, they say, when in Prague...

Re:Damn Blog Hogs, Go swim in a Bog

[Damek]

That's OK, I can solve anything with one snog.

re: Damn Blog Hogs, Go swim in a Bog

[BitterAndDrunk]

does anybody want a peanut?

(ducks and covers, while the mods hover)

Crap Search...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The trick is to figure out which are "splogs" and which are "real" blogs, because both are usually crap.

Re:OG

[archeopterix]

I'll die proud and stubborn before I use those stupid words.

You definitely need some happyctivity in your life.

Fake Blogger blogs ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... started showing up as having linked to my blog in my WordPress Dashboard. I did two things. First, I disabled comments completely. Then I contacted Blogger via the button on each fake blog marking it as something they needed to review. Problem solved. Just my two cents.

Re:How to tell the diff. between Blogs and Splogs:

[stupidfoo]

Maybe you should look up the definition of "phonics".

a method of teaching beginners to read and pronounce words by learning the phonetic value of letters, letter groups, and especially syllables

Hooked on Phonics would not teach you the difference between "useful" and "usefull".

Re:Please Type the characters that you see on this

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. Enter it into your cellphone and send a text message to Google (or whatever Google has you do for a GMail account these days). The number you send it to could even be in a separate capcha, for extra visual pain and opportunity for mistake.

IP address/domain-name checking?

[jkauzlar]

They could always randomly generate text from dictionaries to beat the word verification. But no 'splogger' is going to buy up thousands of IPs or domain names for their clever little scam. Figure in the IP or domain name to the pagerank. Maybe if most of the links are from the same IP then take a percentage off its score? This percentage co-efficient could even be derived from the textual context of the links.. if the context is the same (like the scores of mirrored Wikipedia articles, to name one example), then lower the co-efficient.

Re:IP address/domain-name checking?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is google going to know what IP sent a message to a blog? The problem isn't that blog A has 1000 listings from sploghost.com, but rather that 1000 blogs have 1 listing from sploghost.com. If the blog owners don't record the IP of the submitter and post it on the blog, then how can google get this info?

Re:IP address/domain-name checking?

[jkauzlar]

It doesn't matter who sent the message. The phony blog sites are what are causing problems and their IP is easily found. Public blog hosting companies, hopefully, wouldn't allow scripts to automatically generate blogs on their sites. The phony blog submissions obviously are being submitted by the robot that's creating the blogs.

Re:IP address/domain-name checking?

[suwain_2]

A lot of "splogs" are from places like Blogger. This would unfairly punish those who don't run their own blogs, but instead use something like Blogger. (Or those on busy shared-hosting servers.)

Re:IP address/domain-name checking?

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:IP address/domain-name checking?

[jkauzlar]

It seems to me that these shared-hosting blog sites wouldn't allow people to use scripts to generate entire blog sites..

Re:IP address/domain-name checking?

[jaydonnell]

"But no 'splogger' is going to buy up thousands of IPs or domain names for their clever little scam."

Lol, they already do this. Domain names and IP's are very cheap compared to the amount of money you can make by ranking well.

a new low-point, but who cares?

[Ahaldra]

Automatic creation of blogger accounts. Now that's even one step more than the already rediculus blog and ping automator from the guy believed to be the one spamming boingboing's comment form.
I seriously wonder if the DMCA's or other *AA laws couldn't be used to subpoena the ISP of these guys to get their real addresses. For some reason I doubt they are that many people in the spam and "search engine optimization" business.

How do you tell the difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Filtering spam e-mail is hard enough, but things get impossible when you try to filter spam blogs.

1) "Gwen Stefani rocks, like, totally!!!!1!!! O_O"

2) "When will the Mainstream media finally accept that bloggers and the blogosphere will make them all obsolete!!!! Nobody needs those idiots! The MSM are irrelevant! BTW, did you read in the NYT what this guy said on CNN last week about the WaPo? It was also on Fox News last night, but I didn't pay attention cause I was busy listening to Stern bashing Newsweek"

3) "New V!4gra Soft7tabs free!"

Any correct filtering algorithm would just delete them all. Or at least tag them as redundant.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[biryokumaru]

On a similar note, I think "Splogs Clog Blog Logs" would be a much better title.

There should be an annual Seuss day where all article titles must be tongue twisters, and all summaries must be done in nonsensical rhyme.

splogs clogs blogs shocker!

[capicu]

That is the most Sun-like headline I've ever seen on slashdot. For those of you who aren't in the know about crappy British tabloids, The Sun* is like the most popular paper in the country, and I think owned by Darth Murdoch himself. They quite helpfully have pictures on their main page of recent headlines (flash), hence the link.

*Health warning: please shield your eyes whilst loading the site. The sudden visual impact of the Sun's website can cause severe disorientation, epileptic fits, vomiting, and in some cases death. Not recommended for pregnant women or people with heart conditions

They even quote you sometimes

[digitalgimpus]

In hopes of not looking so spammy, they will take real blogs, and either copy the contents, or just key words (such as authors name and perhaps post title.

So when you search for something... spammers with your name come up, rather than yourself.

Re:They even quote you sometimes

[wastedbrains]

Actually yeah i have run a blog for a long time about energy drinks... I found that spam bloggers trying to make money off energy drink ads and or promote links to their own energy drink have crawled my whole blog and copied nearly all of its contents and made massive splogs that either run google ads or have links all over the place to some energy drink. It is crap and there is no way to contact them to say they are stealing my content... The worst part is that it is working, so many of these fake competition blogs have popped up that i get about half the traffic that i did 6 months ago, because people are ending up at fake copies of my own damn blog with crappy ads all over the place or just spam links to ever dang thing imaginable. to see the original site: http://www.bandddesigns.com/energy and the fake posts that all just have links to my reviews, comments on my site about the drinks and then ads, and spam links... http://www.energy-drink-and-food.info/vamp-energy- drink.html Every drink page does this and some have copy and paste of my text.

Re:They even quote you sometimes

[Neoncow]

maybe you could put your a link to your site in your articles... Like this review originally from http://blah./ It won't stop them from copying it but at least you'll get credit for writing it.

Spam or Cruft?

[nherc]

Honestly, with everyone and their mom jumping on the blogging bandwagon and the general quality of said blogs approaching robot created jibberish, I honestly think the blog hosting companies are in for quite a struggle determining spam from cruft. Although, if their automated measures also wipe out some of these inane blogs as well perhaps the authors will get a hint and the blogsphere will be a better place AFTER the spammers arrived--imagine that.

Re:Spam or Cruft?

[vertinox]

But... But... How else will we secretly carry out our test of the Infinite Monkey Theorem?

splogs aren't the problem...

[ianmassey]

The problem surfaces when the "splogs" are used to comment spam and trackback spam legitimate blogs. It's through these links that PageRank is increased. If everyone starts proactively dealing with spam on their own sites, this problem will solve itself. MovableType users can upgrade to 3.2, which has spam blocking features, or use the great plugin MT-Blacklist. Either will eliminate this problem. An AC mentioned that WordPress has a similar set of options. I know that TypePad does. The only major blog service provider left to come up with a solution is Blogger, and in the interim you can require registration to post comments on your Blogger site or turn comments off entirely. LiveJournal and all the clones are blocked from trackback by 90% of normal blog sites already, so they don't even count.

Another poster suggested that we ignore this problem, and it will go away. Untrue. Ignoring the 600 spam comments a day is exactly what the spammers would prefer you do, so that they can stink up every site on the internet with their crap. We are fortunate that in the case of this "new" form of spam, the tools necessary to get rid of it are already there and effective, we just need to get them all turned on.

Re:splogs aren't the problem...

[frostman]

Too late for moderation, but in case you check your replies...

I figured out two very easy immediate technical solutions to blogspam. They aren't permanent solutions - if lots of people use them, the spammers can very quickly adapt. But as long as most folks (and software systems) are asleep at the wheel and either manually delete the spam or just turn off comments/trackbacks, these methods should work. (Working fine so far, but I've done the anti-spam thing enough to not count my chickens...)

For comment spam the deal is this: require javascript to get to your comments posting cgi, and *then* change the name of that cgi. (Since the current script name is likely in a spam database already.) You can check any entry's permalink on my blog (in my sig) and view source, it should be clear how this bit works. And yes, I have a fallback option for people without Javascript.

For trackback the deal is to deny pings with URLs in the excerpt body. Granted, that potentially denies a few legitimate pings, but I'm guessing it's a tiny, tiny minority, and it rejects with an appropriate error message so those people, if they care to check, will know what happened.

More on that here, with directions for MovableType: http://www.frostopolis.com/flog/archives/2005/10/2 2/000117.html

I realize the trackback fix is especially limited, and doesn't give you any fallback option, but I was getting hammered and just needed a quick fix. If I got lots of legit trackbacks instead of just spam, I might have at least had those log differently... or maybe not.

Anyway, these two things are working just fine for me, and they were trivial to set up.

Re:splogs aren't the problem...

[jaydonnell]

"The problem surfaces when the "splogs" are used to comment spam and trackback spam legitimate blogs."

splogs and comment/trackback spam are two completely different things. The good news is that the splogger problem doesnt' really affect you and I. It's a problem for blogger/google to deal with. Comment spam, on the other hand, is a huge problem for those of us with blogs. Your right about the way to fight it. Spammers thrive on the patterns in blogs. Any coder can prevent almost all spam by renaming the files used for posting, changing the names of the form fields, etc. This isn't a solution for everybody, but it works really well for us geeks.

Re:splogs aren't the problem...

[ianmassey]

Splogs exacerbate comment and trackback spam. As matter of fact, for about 2 months now, my spam has gone from 100% prescription drug crap to 100% "nuisance spam", 80% of which links directly to splogs which are link farms to other splogs, and presumably, eventually to "legit" blogs.

Re:splogs aren't the problem...

[jaydonnell]

I know what your saying, but if they weren't linking to their splogs they'd be linking to some other kind of fake site.

s/rediculus/ridiculous/

[Ahaldra]

and there instead of they. brrrrr.

Posting restrictions

[Redwin]

Why not limit how many posts an account can make in a day? Say 25 or something. If a legitimate user needs to do more than that they could fill in a keyword hidden in a picture, or something equally difficult for an automated system to figure out.

Captain Pitard.

[Anonymous Coward]

"So far nobody has found a solution."

Let's not. Let's blame the people, not the technology. And as the MPAA/RIAA show, technological solutions to problems don't work (but our do! Nay! Nay!). The spammers will simply pull a "Tor" on us, and get away.

one step closer

[BushCheney08]

Ahhh, one step closer to the inevitable webterm of "splooge."

Re:one step closer

[Furry Bastard]

Let's just hope that Doug Winger doesn't get involved.

this problem will not go away

[drDugan]

people and machines
people are (biological) machines
machines emulating people
machines competing with people

within the next few years, computer interaction online and human interaction online will INCREASINGLY pass the sniff test as undifferentiable. a few years after that, there will clearly be no way to tell if online text is human or computer generated.

what I say is -- why stop it? why give moral preference to human thoughts vs. computer output? frankly, in most interactions, my expereince tells me to trust the silicon machines over the carbon ones.

Re:this problem will not go away

[@madeus]

within the next few years, computer interaction online and human interaction online will INCREASINGLY pass the sniff test as undifferentiable. a few years after that, there will clearly be no way to tell if online text is human or computer generated.

"Clearly" indubitably!

what I say is -- why stop it? why give moral preference to human thoughts vs. computer output?

Because computer output isn't thought. Unless your Commander Data and have a Magical Positronic Brain (TM).

frankly, in most interactions, my expereince tells me to trust the silicon machines over the carbon ones.

I trust the hard electric ones even less than the squishy biological ones, primarily on the basis that the squishy biological ones built the hard electric ones in the first place (and my experience is that the squishy biological one's are not all that trustworthy, which I have concluded can't bode well).

This is further re-enforced by my experience of the specific type of squishy biological ones that are usually responsible for developing the software for the hard electric ones - I've found them to be often irrational, weird, oversized, hyped up on mind and mood altering chemicals, socially malfunctioning and generally a bit hatstand.

Re:this problem will not go away

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not want to read machine generated spew. The internet was about humans connecting to humans.

We've been here before with Usenet. It's September all over again.

See an excellent rant:
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

Re:this problem will not go away

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to check up on "How to post correctly in a threaded discussion forum" before presuming to offer advice to anyone else.

Dang, that's a tuffy.

[ryanvm]

Hmmm - keeping useless information from clogging the "blogosphere" has got to be one tough gig.

sk2

[xWastedMindx]

Spam Karma 2 is great for controlling comment spam in Blogs. Although it works only in Wordpress.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[tezbobobo]

Reminds me of time I ate to much ham shoulder. Doctor say, "Spam caused bog clog." Needed enema.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[aussie_a]

How would we be able to tell when it's purposeful though?

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[Xarius]

We call those weekdays.

Oh! Didn't see the word rhyme there.

Re:It's a typo, you tool.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he has both? Maybe he has all of the above, a trophy wife, a yacht, an exclusive membership at the local country club, 2 mistresses and a wine cellar that would make an alcoholic explode. And what's more, he also has a grasp on proper spelling. And, even with all these things, he still manages to not be a total douchebag.

Sure does make you look like a self-important fucktard, doesn't it?

Right under the nose ?

[Gopal.V]

Ok, I'm a great fan of webservices - but this is blatant abuse. And it is clogging up search engines, right under the nose of our very own Google. They could implement some internal solution and work-around this right now. But who uses any other web search anyway.

I'd like to see what blogger throws up when you hit it with a user-agent as googlebot. Will it be different from what it churns out to the general public - Now and in the near future.

Not only that

[LeonGeeste]

This isn't even a real problem, if you think about. I tried to go to blog I know about recently and I got a bunch of so-called "spam" (ads) instead of the blog content. So I checked it out and I was able to book a great vacation deal from a discount airliner. Hey, if you guys want to stop them from offering great vacation deals, go ahead. I personally like the savings.

Re:Not only that

[TedCheshireAcad]

I agree with parent. My penis has grown a whole six feet since I started using the internet.

I can see it now...

[aussie_a]

splogbot.com will be the next big website Google will buy.

PageRank's fatal assumption

[G4from128k]

PageRank appears to assume that each link is made independently of the target site. These splogs and other SEO tricks violate that assumption when commercially linked entities create links to each other's sites. Biasing the vote of a link based on some site credibility measure only helps slightly as automation lets sloggers create massive numbers of spurious links. With PageRank, its too easy to buy votes.

Google needs some mechanism judging if a link is a fair link (made by an independent person/process) or "bought" link created by on on behalf of the same site that being linked to. I'd bet if Google analyzed these splogs and other SEO-generated sites, they'd find an excessive number of links from the splog to the target (or other in-network splogs) but few links from the splog to other relevant sites. Perhaps Google should reweight sites that seem to focus too many links in one direction. Of course, this is only a temporary solution as SEOs/sploggers could just use Google to find a set of random, but relevant, links to add to their splog.

The deeper problem is that no matter what Google does, some clever SEO will find a way around it. And since sites seeking to be at the top of the search out number Google engineers by a wide margin, the SEOs would seem to have the advantage. The only group with greater numbers than the SEOs are Google users. I suspect the ultimate solution will mean social ranking systems where each Google user gets to rank pages and have a reputation for page ranking. The user reputation system would mitigate attempts by SEOs to either up-rank their pages or down-rank competitor's pages.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[Anonymous Coward]

And the next step would be: buy Google users, or easier (ATM) infect their computers with Trojans that do the work. Blog spam / guestbook spam already seems to come via Trojans.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[Anonymous Coward]

PageRank appears to assume that each link is made independently of the target site.

No it doesnt.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[reed]

A similar approach would be to use web-based aggregators or large trackers and factor the number of feed subscribers into a blog's PageRank. Nobody is going to subscribe to a spam-blog, and also, lots of people subscribe to blog feeds but don't neccesarily link to the blog from another web page.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Google wrote a paper about TrustRank which is designed to evaluate the trustworthiness of a page, independent of number of links.

(Disclosure: I work in "white hat" SEO, where we try to actually make sites more friendly, fast and useful for end users; this black hat SEO stuff doesn't do us any favours at all, so I'm keen to see these spammers wiped out by any means).

Rich.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[courtarro]

If this adjustment were made, spammers would start subscribing to their own splogs. You're just moving the hoops to jump through farther and farther from the end goal (finding what you need online).

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[slicer622]

how bout a moderate function? outfoxed allows you to tag a site with a review, and see others in your social network and what they thought of the site. if it catches on, google could augment page rank with similar functionality.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[emurphy42]

ISTR a story about Google patenting a number of things that may or may not be part of PageRank, one of which was the speed at which new links appear - a site that gradually receives 10,000 links over the course of a month is more likely to be legit than a site that suddenly receives 10,000 links in one hour. If they are using something like that, then it ought to force splogs (or any other form of black-hat SEO) to slow down or be crippled.

Re:PageRank's fatal assumption

[SEO Black Hat]

Relying on page rank for your link exchanges and purchases is even more flawed than you might think. We have shown how to fake a page rank 10 or any page rank you want. A better metric for choosing a linking partner is how well a site is performing in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)for a search term you are interested in.

Caveat emptor.

Re:Word verification? -broken allready !

[SuneSpeg]

Word verification has been broken allready, by crosslinking the image to a website.
That way naive users *THINK* they decipher a WV image on the current website, while they infact have done the owner of the website a favor and read the scrambled image from google ,and given the spammer a valueable information.

Often in return for pictures of people with alzheimers that forgot to put clothes on.

Word verification is obsolete

[Animats]

Word verification is obsolete.

• Programs have been written that can successfully decode capchas most of the time. It turns out not to be too hard to modify OCR programs to do this.
• Word verification can be outsourced to third world countries at low cost.
• Most cleverly, word verification can outsourced to users of your porno sites, who have to type in soneone else's capcha to get free pictures.

All these approaches are in active use.

Re:Word verification is obsolete

[PeeAitchPee]

Maybe beatable, yes, but still 99%+ effective and definitely not obsolete in practice. Most of the successful existing CAPTCHA attacks use a dictionary matched to the default wordlist that ships with the CAPTCHA and can usually be defeated by running the CAPTCHA in random mode with a few more characters than usual. I get maybe four or five hand-entered spam comments / week, which are usually quickly blocked after the first attempt by blacklisting the target "online drugstore" / poker / whatever site's URL. If I shut my CAPTCHA off I get *thousands* of spam comments / week. So while the technology has its limitations (such as, for instance, excluding blind users), it's a tradeoff that most individual blog owners find beats sifting through hundreds or thousands of spammed comments / week.

Re:Word verification is obsolete

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of just typing in the word, users should have to solve a modest algebra problem. That way you eliminate both spambots and users who probably don't deserve a forum anyway.

By the way...

[Poromenos1]

Why is everyone bashing blogs so hard? I know that most of the blogs are the rantings of 16-year-olds, but that's a gross generalization. A blog is a site you post on, and many sites fit that definition, including Slashdot, Maddox (who went on to bash blogs recently), and, well, most other sites.

Re:By the way...

[xWastedMindx]

Everyone is _not_ bashing blogs, at least directly anyway. We're bashing Splogs, which are spam blogs (used for increasing page ranks of crap websites). We're also bashing spam comments, which are left in Blogs.

A blog is a site you post on, and many sites fit that definition, including Slashdot, Maddox (who went on to bash blogs recently), and, well, most other sites.

Now if this were true, almost every website on the internet would be a blog. In general, a Blog is a website set up in a Journalized fashion. Where users can submit information which is posted with date/time information and can also be commented on by other users(registered or not) See this page here for a definition on blogs.

Re:By the way...

[Poromenos1]

We're bashing Splogs, which are spam blogs

I'm not referring to the article, I'm referring mostly to the comments. See how many of them are of the type "one cannot tell blogs and splogs apart" and "blogs should die".

Your definition is indeed better than mine, but still the examples I gave fit it. When people think of blogs they think of a girl that types "liek this omg ^_^" and the word blog still has that pejorative connotation. I agree that there is a lot of useless content on them, but most of you read blogs every day, and you know they're past that "omg" stage.

Re:By the way...

[Anonymous Coward]

None of those examples really fit the definition of a blog.

Re:It's a typo, you tool.

[stupidfoo]

The funny thing is that I wasn't even responding to your post. My post was in response to sethadam1's. Toodles.

Advertising: Out of control

[Andrewkov]

Is it just me, or is there way too much advertising these days? Radio is almost completely unlistenable to me since most stations play about 20 minutes of commercials each hour, TV has the same problem. Hell, even when you *pay* to get into a movie, you have to watch 20 mins of trailers for other movies, plus actual televeision ads!! Not to mention all the product placement in movies. Email is almost completely useless because of spam, and blogging is heading that way. Usenet was killed by spam years ago. Most of us here are using AdBlock and other techniques to reduce advertising on web sites. You can't even download shareware anymore without it coming bundled with ad-ware. And now I'm getting voice mail spam on my cell phone (any idea how frustrating it is to listen to a voice mail while in rush hour traffic, navigating the menus and stuff, since it might be a work or family emergency, only to find out it's spam?). Plus I can't even drive on the highway without being bombarded with billboard ads, not to mention that every car in front of me has a nice little manufacturers ad glued to the bumper. And then there's Google style ads -- little text only blurbs that are related to your search (or gmail content). These are even more insideous, since they're harder to filter out.

Sorry for the rant, but this is all just becomming too much, and it's only getting worse. Are we as a society willing to accept this in the name of free services?

Not Even a New Problem

[ackthpt]

That story is about comment spam, where as this is about people creating spam blogs

Spam in blogs isn't even new. I've seen short comments, best wishes, etc. on blogs for the last couple years, which are then followed by a plug, something like the following:

That's a very interesting point you have raised and deserves great consideration. You might also want to consider visiting my vitamin and supplements site at www.vitacrap.com/~jimbob

Allowing HTML as part of a post is pretty much asking for it.

so is stileproject.com a splog site?

[British]

Look on the site. It is 99% advertising to porn sites only semi-cleverly disguised as "blogger"-like content. The rest of the site is porn banners.

And of course he uses deceptive advertising. Clicking on the occasional link to a free .wmv file actually redirects you to yet another porn site.

Of course, I can't even remember the last time it had any original written content. Just gross pictures.

Re:How to tell the diff. between Blogs and Splogs:

[KillerDeathRobot]

Hooked on Phonics would not teach you the difference between "useful" and "usefull".

Maybe you should look at the definition again. "Useful" and "Usefull" are phonetically identical (to English speakers). Hooked on Phonics would not teach any difference between the two spellings.

When you're trying to insult people through ridiculous pedantry, at least be right.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[bcattwoo]

And they forgot to end the article summary with the obligatory: is this the beginning of the end for blogging?

Maybe mentioning Google trumps the need for ominous speculation.

You know why this happens?

[nagora]

Because PageRank sucks and has done for years. It worked for about a year until rigging it became a financially rewarding activity and since then it has served no purpose.

If Google could at least exclude blogs from the main index it might help a bit but in the long run PageRank is a dead duck.

TWW

Re:How to tell the diff. between Blogs and Splogs:

[MBraynard]

Re-read it again. He is right and you mis-read it.

Guestbooks are been spammed too!!

[erasmix]

Over the last few weeks I have been finding spam messages with advertising on the visitor's guestbook of my personal website. This is an absolute disgrace!! Isn't there a way to fight back? Flod the companies that are been advertised with traffic? Or flod the IP addresses where the spam is comming from so they cannot spam?

Re:Guestbooks are been spammed too!!

[museumpeace]

blogger instituted captcha interaction for comment submission to blogs...it was getting pretty stupid: you could put a blog for, say, your church and once there was a post up, there would fairly soon be a "comment" like "Wow, that is a really interesting post! I bet you would really like the pictures on my website"
The only thing Blogger missed was forcing commenters to respond to captchas by default.

why not just call them clogs?

[Anonymous Coward]

i've seen people call them splogs for spam blogs, but wouldn't a better word for all commercial blogs and advertising/spam blogs be clogs?

Block the advertised sites, not the spam.

[MarkByers]

It sounds like you could use that suggestion to deliberately get your competitors delisted from google by spamming links to their site in blogs.

Dangerous.

Re:Block the advertised sites, not the spam.

[MaceyHW]

The OP is suggesting that the "sploging" (now I feel dirty) site be removed from ranking calculations, not the site being boosted. For example, if my site SEOgawd.com suddenly creates 3,000 links to Widgets.com, then all SEOgawd links are removed from ranking calculations and Widgets.com is still ranked according to the remaining links. Therefore you can't harm a competitor

Re:Block the advertised sites, not the spam.

[keraneuology]

Correct me if I am wrong, but google already has rules against trying to manipulate PageRank... there doesn't seem to have been many abuses of this, probably because if you did this to a competitor the lawyers would be lining up to take your case.

Re:Block the advertised sites, not the spam.

[jaydonnell]

How do you know there haven't been many abuses of this? More importantly, how could you prove, or even find out, which competitor did something like this to you?

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[Hoi Polloi]

"Are we as a society willing to accept this in the name of free services?"

This isn't even necessarily part of receiving a free service. Just look at the examples you cited, did you pay to go to the movies? So why do you have to pay to see ads? I truly doubt that the cost is being held down for you by the ads, more likely it is just extra profit for the theaters at your expense.

How about this for a solution....

[Rac3r5]

find these rogue programmers...
find their bosses

and beat the crap out of them...

Solution

[Poleris]

Why not assign a higher page rank to older pages? It makes sense and would help prevent Google bombing.

Re:Solution

[ZachPruckowski]

That'd give undue influence to out of date pages. There are a lot of pages on some topics that are obsolete and basically abandoned. They'd cause their own problem. Ideally, you want to get sites that have been around for a while, but are regularly updated.

MOD PARENT DOWN Cwazymail link!

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent links to a page which has the ominous Cwazymail image. Beware!

Sometimes we need to get more old-fashioned

[Roadkills-R-Us]

Track the guy down and beat the snot out of him
Get a video.
Send it to all the trad media outlets as well as
online outlets.

``Clog the blog, we flog.''

Or just bring back public stocks and floggings.
I've long wised we'd do this for a number of crimes.

And yes, I am completely serious.

Time inbetween

[PGC]

Doesn't blogger.com have a minimal time inbetween postings from a single ip ? Off course that can be circumvented, but it would be a first step. And can't google punish the sites being linked to by simply removing them from their search-results alltogether... iaw black list them? If they can do it for China, why not for the common-good ?

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[bmalia]

I like watching the trailors for other movies when I'm at the theater. In addition, the 20 minute trailor time (more like 10 minutes in the theater I go to), allows you to show up a bit late to the theater and still not miss your show.

I think you are on to something

[Chapium]

I'm liking what I'm seeing. This would require the person writing a blog to know how to: A: use some sort of online payments system, and B: not just make up blogs on a whim (some people are so cheap)

human moderation

[thomasf]

I think that while there have been some clever preventative measures described here, computer-based logic will always already be just slightly behind human users. Sorting and value-labeling requires human attention to the particular that computers (and many of their fanatical devotees) simply lack. This doesn't mean things like PageRank have to be continually abandoned, just supplemented by human input.

Excuse me if that was too obvious.

I wondered when this would happen

[museumpeace]

I have only used the e-mail posting interface to my blogger blogs a few times. If you like simplicity, the blogger online editor is quick-and-dirty posting for free. But the potential for abuse when you combine the easy-setup for gaining an account and the email method for posting is obvious.

its kind of ironic that google, which has had fewer [not "no", just fewer] security gaffs than Microsoft is, in a sense, suffering security embarrassment for a rather similar reason to the origins of Microsofts security mis-steps: trying to appeal to users by providing very streamlined and simple user interfaces to functions that require privelege [account creation, publication] on most systems [think unix or Apache]...yes the additional "hassles" of authenticating and establishing the remote request is from a human and not a bot are an impediment to users. But catering to utter lazy dummies is a worse hassle as ought to be clear to everyone by now. Funny this is now news. If you went to blogger 6 months ago and sellected a random blog and then just surfed randomly by hitting "NextBlog" button, you would have seen dozens of sights that were just huge steaming piles of links for such vital topics as online shoe purchases ...abject link-stuffing pollution for google's own search engine and festering on google's own blogging service...seemed pretty dumb to me. BTW give google credit for putting a captcha feature on post commenting because comment spam used to be just as easy to blast into blogger posts as splogging.

one solution

[Anonymous Coward]

And I say this with all sincerity is either ignore them, use counter spamming of some kind, disinformation techniques, semeli (spelling? It's the psychological art of changing the meening of a symbol), and if all that fails-good old fationed beetings work (seriously). In the reel world if someone disagrees men don't seem to have any issues with resorting to roughing their friends up. I assume that if these spammers are sending out junk that some kind of pattern based rules can be established to send their junk back in a transparent fation so that PageRank doesn't even see it. Or since googles now a for proffit worse comes to worse find their offenders banks and let them know you'll stop supporting them econmicly and do all everything in your power to ensure their economic life isn't as rich.

Even more old-fashioned

[cryptochrome]

Make douchbaggery a hangable offense.

"We the jury find the defendent guilty of 1,204,652 counts of false advertising, and one count of being a world-class prick. We hereby sentence him to be hung by the neck until he is dead."

Re:Even more old-fashioned

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you do on Slashdot then? Most of the commenters would be hanged after their first "Micro$oft is teh l0se" post.

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[Hosiah]

Heeeeyack! It's a CAPITALIST society! The only way you keep one going is to keep people buying more and more stuff!

Who among us could not grok the same frustration? Funny anecdote: My kid went on a school field trip which included a stop at McDonald's. She returned with her happy-meal toy: a tiny little stuffed puppy-doll with a hu-u-ge tag sewn to it, just screaming with advertising and copyright information. The tag was about three times as big as the dog. I sent her for the scissors and snipped the tag off (in blatant disregard for the fine print saying I was committing a crime). Then the light bulb went off, and I asked her for all the *rest* of her stuffed animals. We had great fun performing tag-ectomies, as I explained to her that we had bought and paid for everything in the house, so it was ours to do with as we pleased, including stripping the commercial propaganda out of it. I think dolls are more fun to play with when they're allowed to just be dolls. She agreed. I'm just doing my best to raise a lawless little punk, here! (:

It's stuff like that that frustration with corporate capitalism can drive you to.

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[Anonymous Coward]

Theaters I've gone to typically start the movie about 20 to 25 minutes after the official start time, so they can play trailers and commercials. You can come late if you don't mind stumbling around in the dark and not getting a good seat.

Not news.

[idhindsight]

All blogs were already spam. Now it's just unashamedly so.

Green Eggs and Spam

[Comboman]

Splogs clog blog logs.

Spam jams Stan's LAN.

Guy's WiFi goes awry.

CERN confirms worm, firms squirm.

Forget cassette and diskette, USB key snazzy.

Nimrods applaud iPods abroad, while tightwads called slipshod clawed screen fraud.

One Phish, Two Phish.

Red Phish, Blue Phish.

Message board spam

[xanadu113]

I suspect they are using the same tactics on web based message boards, My forum, at www.compassionatecoalition.org has gotten a ton of spam posts, and fake user accounts, with links to their sites. I've had suspicions that this is what they were trying to do for a while now.

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[WolfZombie]

Well, advertising wouldn't be spiralling out of control quite as much if every single person wasn't trying to make a million dollars by age 25. What ever happened to working for what you earn, and then enjoying those earnings. I know at least the US is on a fast track to having a lot of unhappy people with way too much money that isn't worth anything.

Maybe I'll just go live under a rock... as long as I can get wireless high speed internet ;)

Public access = spam = stupid implementation

[gr8_phk]

Email allows anyone to send it - the result is SPAM. Blogs allow anyone to post comments - the result is spam. We should have learned this by now. Blogs need a handy way for bloggers to moderate comments before they appear. C'mon it's not rocket science.

Re:Public access = spam = stupid implementation

[spx]

Wordpress has two little buttons you check called: Anyone can register & Users must be registered and logged in to comment..........I set mine up so that only when you register, will I allow a user to post. That problem solved, even with the site still being under work, I have had no problems what so ever. Im sure it applies to most blog softwares, I dont know how Blogger works, but this seems to have solved my problem, so please dont state that blogs allow anyone to post, thats just not true man.

Reverse-weight the spamvertised sites' Page Rank

[habig]

None of this would happen if there was no money driving the attacks. How to make it not financially worthwhile to pay people to spam for you should be the question.

People in this thread have mentioned a number of things which would make such spam more technically difficult to pull off, none of which would be foolproof.

However, some combination of these techniques could be used by the search engine (handy, that Google the Blogspot-owner-victim is also the search engine being manipulated) to simply flag spammy links internally. And then use them as negative modifiers in its pagerank algorithm. So, questionable attempts to google bomb your site makes it drop off the face of google. Silently.

Sure, this could be abused to try and stifle competitor's pageranking. But that's a second order effect, within the realm of possibility to manually correct, as a whitelist of commercial targets bad guys have tried to frame has got to be more easy to maintain than a blacklist of fly-by-night spam sellers.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[saskboy]

Just wait until porn sites use it more. Then there will be Porno Splogs Clog Blog Web Logs. Plogs as I call them will be the next big thing on the Interweb.

In other news: door locks are obsolete

[heson]

Since there exists a multitude of ways to defeat door locks, they are useless to stop burglars. Save yourself a couple of bucks and use a hinge instead.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Reverse-weight the spamvertised sites' Page Ran

[Anonymous Coward]

However, some combination of these techniques could be used by the search engine (handy, that Google the Blogspot-owner-victim is also the search engine being manipulated) to simply flag spammy links internally. And then use them as negative modifiers in its pagerank algorithm. So, questionable attempts to google bomb your site makes it drop off the face of google. Silently.

This has already been happening for some time. Google has a number of filters it uses to look for "shady" optimization techniques. If you manage to get caught up in one, your site winds up in a penalty box and may never get out.

Blacklists and whatnot

[Wonko42]

Splogspot provides a searchable index of splogs, as well as an RSS feed of the most recently discovered splogs. ReferrerCop provides a searchable index of referrer spam (which often consists of splogs) as well as downloadable blacklists in a variety of formats.

--At a conferance table in Redmond, WA--

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill: ...so they blacklist those sites now. So what I figure is that we hire out a third party to googlebomb-
Steve: Bomb Google!
Bill: - to googlebomb Slashdot, and-
Steve: I'm going to fscking bury slashdot!
Bill: - and heck, let's googlebomb google.com. Take em both out. And sourceforge. And Apple. And Mozilla. And Opera. And anything else that bugs us.
Steve: *sniff* I love you Bill...
Bill: Love you too big guy. Now lets go fscking bury google *together*.

no popularity contest, thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving from an automatic ranking to a user ranking system only moves the bias from those with a profit motive to those with too much time on their hands. The latter group isn't necessarily going to create a more meaningful ranking. I don't particularly want search results ordered by their attractiveness to unemployed twentysomething social miscreants any more than I want them ordered by spammers.

Antisocial behavior

[Archimboldo]

Jeez, that's like some 500 pound guy dropping a huge smelly turd on the internet and stinking it up for hundreds of millions of people while he gaffaws.

Do we have to observe the Geneva conventions for US citizens? I recommend caning for starters then more severe punishment.

No solution?

[baadger]

Why can you create an account using the API anyway? Is this a necessity?

Even if there is a good reason for this capability, surely just throwing in a image (or sound) verification stage will make your problem will go away?

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[IamGarageGuy 2]

Personal note - weened my 5 year old off of McDonalds. Just went with the phrase "Daddy doesn't go to Donalds" - after a while - he doesn't even ask anymore. The kid knew McDonalds before he was ever there, from birth! - pretty good job if they can advertise to the kids before they can learn to speak.

Solution?

[Porchroof]

Why, hang 'em by the ____ and then a hour later start a fire under them.

Do this to everyone who has the attitude of making the Internet a headache rather than the pleasure it could be.

What's the best way to filthify a new computer? Give it access to the Internet.

(New word, filthify. To cause to become filthy.)

Blogs As Clusterfucks

[meehawl]

It's so hard to tell "legitimate" high-ranked blogs from algorithmically generated blogs because the two are so damn similar. Many of the high-rank blogs are just incestuous clusterfucks with groupthinkers promiscuously and reflexively linking to each other in a slutty daisychain link. Run the same stories, gangbang the same audience, pimp out the same adverts. Especially good for iPods, porn, and robot women. Why get peeved when the machines can do it better?

You reap what you sow.

Re:Experts Exchange

[vertinox]

I wish I could simply ban certain domains from my search, ie ign owned sites, experts exchange or whatever it is called, etc.

Maybe a little rant of mine but you brought up a pet peave of mine with google with that Expert Exchange site...

That Expert exchange is the bane for my existence for what I do for a livng. I hate them with a passion... Everytime I type an exact error message into Google these jokers come as the top hit. But obviously they don't provide the answer... I can't believe people would legitametly link to them since it obvious they are covered with ads and no information.

Though apparently some one spent a great deal of time capturing all possible Microsoft Knowledge base error messages to put up a page for each on on that site to get people to visit. That or they stole subjects from computer repair forums. Grrr...

That is why I usually search google groups first before hitting the main search.

Eh

[Auraiken]

I don't think anyone is looking forward to splogcasting. 0.o

Use Invites

[barik]

I think the idea of using 'g-mail' style invites might be a good idea here. Legitimate users won't want to risk getting their accounts disabled, so they will be more careful about who they invite. And unscrupulous users can easily be founded and eliminated at the root by assuming that they and all children of the user are invalid. It doesn't work well for small sites, but for high-visiblity sites like Blogger, it could be very effective.

Re:Please Type the characters that you see on this

[generic-man]

To send a text message, my provider charges 5 cents. Are you implying that most blog posts are worth 5 cents to publish?

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[jcr]

Radio is almost completely unlistenable to me

Is it? I wouldn't know, since I haven't listened to the radio since I got my first iPod three years ago.

-jcr

+1 Accurate

[ergo98]

I don't particularly want search results ordered by their attractiveness to unemployed twentysomething social miscreants any more than I want them ordered by spammers.

So very, very true.

I marvel seeing some of the comments on here that Google et all should pay more attention to the "social" sites. I've seen the results of places like Digg and Delicious, and if that's what groupthink gets us, then forget about it. I use, and love, Flickr, but their "interestingness" ranking could better be expressed as the "Flickr Popularity" - the people who spend all day in the Flickr forums are the ones with the "interesting" pictures, for instance. Virtually all social sites are like that.

Can't be any worse...

[Agarax]

... than the crap thats already out there.

Honestly, how many, petty, narcissistic, narrowminded blogs have you found that polluted your mind for hours afterward.

I'll take the spam.

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[Buran]

Not mine! I took the dealer ad off my car. Hey dealer! Want to advertise yourself? Why aren't you sending me a check every month to pay for that little badge? You didn't pay me, so your ad went into the trash! (Plus, the car looks much better without it...)

Reach out and spank someone!

[SgtSnorkel]

Yes, all these sites are gameable -- delicious, digg, google, etc. The real solution is to teach people what actions are acceptable in polite society, and what are not. Many can't seem to figure it out for themselves, but will respond to polite guidance if offered in a friendly manner -- we all need to do that.

The childishly disruptive will probably respond to simple public embarassment and peer pressure.

Ultimately though, the real parasites and greedsters, like these blog-spammers, need to be hunted down and stripped of privileges.

Yup, lots of issues about who defines what's allowed, etc. I'm willing to accept that kind of discussion in place of all this spam-crap!

Splogs Fog, Clog Blog Cogs, Hog Logs

[wsanders]

Is it Zog? Or just some Wog? That uses splogs to Jog my blog?

Foo!
Bar!
Baz!
Qog!

Solution.

[ScrewMaster]

So far nobody has found a solution.

Finding that "wily programmer" and kneecapping the bastard might help.

Re:Splogs? Seriously wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

> There should be an annual Seuss day where all article titles must be tongue twisters, and all summaries must be done in nonsensical rhyme.

So, all we have to do is make the regular slashdot articles rhyme?

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it? I wouldn't know, since I haven't listened to the radio since I got my first iPod three years ago.

I agree! I hate advertising. That's why my Apple iPod is great! I find it especially useful when I use it with Apple iTunes to download all that great music by Kanye West.

I listen to my iPod all the time. Even on the can.

Add to Firefox Search ENgins List?

[TFGeditor]

How would one go about adding these to the Firefox search enfines list/pulldown menu?

It's not illegal damnit

[Anonymous Coward]

The tag must remain on UNTIL it is sold to the consumer. The tag is there to tell you, the consumer, about the product. Once you buy it and are informed then you can do whatever you want to the tag.

RTFT.

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[jcr]

Joke all you want, but it's still a fact that the iPod makes it very easy to do without the radio.

-jcr

Re:Advertising: Out of control

[Hosiah]

weened my 5 year old off of McDonalds.

Good choice! Our family doesn't do fast food - period - but this was school we're talking about. So I caved. Have you noticed how much kids are targeted by advertising while in school? My kids bring home marketing junk from places like Home Depot and FedEx (T-shirts and such) that visit class. FedEx actually sent the daughter home with a temporary tattoo. I drew the line there - big business wants to graffitti their logo on my kid's bodies? I pitched it.

As the only human being on Blogger...

[Hosiah]

I say again, Blogger sucks. I am repeatedly incredulous that Google is tied to this company. Blogger is doing - and will do - *nothing* about *anything*. Picture a dark office with empty cubicles and nobody there and phones lighting up and ringing and going unanswered. That's Blogger.com. Try emailing *anything* to *any* Blogger email address such as tech support - you get the same canned autoresponse pointing you at their scanty help pages - and nothing else. The server goes down for days at a time before somebody even notices. Note the "news" section on the Blogger.com page: last updated August 17th. Watch and see how long before this article's issue is even addressed - if ever!

Yet I stick with it, simply because I get traffic there that I don't get anywhere else. I go to *any* other blog site, which is actually staffed and the *code* *works* (Bloggerese bears no resemblance to HTML or any other known language, and is distinguishable in that it NEVER works the same way on two consecutive days.) and the site's always up. And I sit with my beautiful blog listening to the crickets chirp! I put it on Blogger and get 200 hits per day right at the start. The most popular piece of abandonware on the internet.

An awful thought - what if the traffic is ALL BOTS????

Counter-Point

[LPetrazickis]

If Google starts paying more attention to your favourite social bookmarking site, spammers will write automated tools (or exploit the existing API) to spam it with their crap and ruin it for you. Unless, of course, your social bookmarking site has a better idea for rooting out automated accounts than Blogger does...