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Splogs Clog Blog Services

Posted by Hemos on from the like-LDLs dept.

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."

8 of 241 comments (clear)

  1. Splogs? Seriously wtf by ponds · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Charitable donation by Honkytonkwomen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Damn Blog Hogs, Go swim in a Bog by slicer622 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Crap Search... by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    "Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
  5. Re:Username trend? by De+Lemming · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

  6. Re:Word verification? by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  7. Word verification is obsolete by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

  8. Green Eggs and Spam by Comboman · · Score: 5, Funny
    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.

    --
    Support Right To Repair Legislation.