This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.
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3 Sep 2003
I’ve been getting a fair amount of comment spam recently. Some of it is outright spam with people using bots to post dozens of comments that look just like your typical email spam. Other comments contain only a short, generic message such as “very good” or “I like the site” but then have the spammer’s payload URL in the contact section of the post. I imagine that the point behind the later is to increase their incoming links to affect search engines like Google.
I’ve been deleting these as I come across them, but the volume has increased dramatically in the last few weeks. Instead of one every month or so, I’m getting comment spam almost every day now. In talking to Brad, he pointed out a scary scenario that would have bots crawling looking for sites to send spam trackback pings to.
I’m fed up and want your help in devising a solution that will curtail this. I’ve drawn upon features of BBSs, authentication systems, and forum software for ideas on how to stop this. Please add your feedback and additional ideas.
To prevent automated bots from flooding a site with comments, we could add posting limits to comment and trackback systems. The average person can’t submit more than one comment every few seconds, so comment systems could enforce a minimum time between comments. A single IP address could only post one comment every 30 seconds. If the commenter ignores the limit and keeps trying to post, it’s obviously a bot. So any IP address that tries to post 4 or more comments in 30 seconds is automatically banned for a short period of time. This would also work for TrackBack spam.
What else could we do? And anyone want to jump in and implement some of this for popular systems?
You have excellent ideas represented in this BLOG. Many of them could be used by more than just blog but could migrate into email, web page comments, IM and other areas where spamming is frequent.
However, while select individual sites can be protected with such advance techniques, do we have an infrastructure that allows such protection to be available on a more global scale? Right now, I sense this is a grass-roots level for which support is needed (perhaps at the standards committee level). Is anyone lobbying the standards bodies for incorporation of such proven ideas? Will the best of these ideas be incorporated in commercial-ware? Unless these ideas reach the average consumer, they are falling far short of their potential.
So how can these ideas be marketed?
The simple way to do it is to remove all url in comments.
No way to steal visitors = no reason to put comment spam on a page…
An other way to fight back: Build a link farm where you put a link to all the comment spammer’s websites. They will be soon penalysed by google and nobody will find them ;).
I like distributed/collaborative approaches to fight spam.
For weblog with few comment volume, pre approval of comments may be the answer. If you know that your comment will first be read by a moderator/blog owner, and that you know that it will never be approved why would you want to put a comment spam ? Pre approval via email turn a Comment Spam into a regular spam with smaller audience and regular email spam tool already available could be used…
kaushal parikh http://www.kaushalparikh.com
Excerpt: [11/14/2004] Update: [Adam Kalsey has a piece][adam] from Sep 2003 that includes more or less what I call Secret Tags. Since it's from Sep 2003, the credit goes to him, even I discovered his piece just today. Adam, too, says...
I agree very much with your point about spamming on comments. Why don’t you just make sure that the topic is really addressed honestly? If it is addressed legitimately, then you should allow the link. If it’s just a short and meaningless comment, then I would delete it. People should be rewarded for their honest interests in specific topics.
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Adam Kalsey
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November 7, 2003 9:08 AM
A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam
Excerpt: Spam in blog comments is quite different from email spam and can be fought in a much more direct manner.