This interview with a comment spammer should be of interest to bloggers dealing with this online pestilence. In a nutshell, comment spam is legal but unscrupulous use of blogs' comment features to game search engines and drive up traffic to various vice and pharm-oriented websites. ["Sam"] uses the thousands of "open proxies" on the net. These are machines which, by accident (read: clueless sysadmins) or design (read: clueless managers) are set up so that anyone, anywhere, can access another website through them. Usually intended for internal use, so a company only needs one machine facing the net, they're actually hard to lock down completely. Sam's code gets hundreds of open proxies to obediently spam blogs and other sites with the messages he wants posted. They usually target comments to old posts, so they won't show up to people reading the latest ones, though search engine spiders will spot them and index them. The only foolproof solution (or at least the only solution "Sam" admits he dreads) is to install "captchas" on your site, such as randomly generated letters mangled in an imaging program that are readable by humans but not spambots, which would have to be typed in at the start of each comment.
If users have accounts like a forum, then they only have to enter the code once. on a site I work on, we modified the phpBB forum software into a blog.
I also recommend closing comments on posts more than X weeks old (I picked two).
Franklin
Artblog.net
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This interview with a comment spammer should be of interest to bloggers dealing with this online pestilence. In a nutshell, comment spam is legal but unscrupulous use of blogs' comment features to game search engines and drive up traffic to various vice and pharm-oriented websites. The only foolproof solution (or at least the only solution "Sam" admits he dreads) is to install "captchas" on your site, such as randomly generated letters mangled in an imaging program that are readable by humans but not spambots, which would have to be typed in at the start of each comment.
- tom moody 2-01-2005 3:35 am
If users have accounts like a forum, then they only have to enter the code once. on a site I work on, we modified the phpBB forum software into a blog.
- paul (guest) 2-01-2005 8:05 am
I also recommend closing comments on posts more than X weeks old (I picked two).
Franklin
Artblog.net
- anonymous (guest) 2-03-2005 1:50 am