mysterious spam   ...   blog-on-blog action , comment_spam
fri 2005-sep-02 00:59:27 pdt   ...   permalink

So my blog-comment-spam problem has gotten somewhat worse... For a while it was just a few coming in every now and then. A few weeks ago I got a bunch all in one day, which prompted me to finish the code that I'd started some time before which allows me to very quickly and easily delete a comment. When I did that, it turned out I actually broke posting comments entirely for a little while (which turns out to do quite a good job of stopping the spam, actually!), but then I fixed that.

( adventures in battling comment spam )

I don't get people.

comment spam avoidance   ...   blog-on-blog action , comment_spam
wed 2005-jan-19 19:30:45 pst   ...   permalink

Google has announced a new initiative to eliminate the problem of blog comment spam. Basically the idea is that site providers (or more importantly, blog software developers) can mark links that were posted by users as distinct from links actually put there by the site maintainers. This way Google can ignore user-created links for the purposes of computing Page Rank, thus removing the incentive for the online casinos and pharmacies to post comment spam in the first place. w00t!

Since this blog is not driven by Movable Type, the scripts that automate the comment spam posting process don't work here, and as a result, I haven't really had a problem with comment spam. (I did get one once, which was really strange, since it means someone must have posted it by hand...) But I figured I would go ahead and make the (very simple) changes in my code anyway, so that I now conform to it. Now I guess the question arises of whether I should go back and modify all the existing comments, just for the sake of consistency...