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

Word verification is obsolete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Word verification is obsolete.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.