Michael Gracie

Joe Budzinski noted he had to take “draconian” measures to block comment spam on his weblog.

I’d hardly call keyword blocking “cool site” draconian, but I even missed that one myself. I’m going to miss all the compliments though.

Boing Boing founder and co-editor Mark Frauenfelder likened comment spam to environmental polution, saying:

“You have to waste brain cycles to filter it out, or, if you own a blog, you have to go through extraordinary measures to keep it out.”

Can’t target Boing Boing for any funnies here, as the blog beats Spamroll’s traffic by what…10 trillion X? But I can say that the extent of my wasted brainpower was installing the latest version of MovableType with its newest spam filtering capabilities. Since then, virtually nothing (at least that is causing me any headaches that is).

but how about the spam? I haven’t seen much in the way blog spam coming from Blogspot as of late. Chris Pirillo was screaming bloody murder about it a few months back, as were other high-profile types.

What happened to Google’s splogs? Did someone put the breaks on it, or is everyone still having a problem with it (and it just so happened to be the sensationalist news of the day)?
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Elliot Lee loves comment spam with spunk. The fact that the spammer’s site misspelled the word “editing” on the same page he offers a Dreamweaver course (which includes a link to an “academic calendar”) is hilarious.

I get about a hundred comment and trackback spams a week. I know there are others who get a lot more, so it doesn’t bother me too much. And I know that a lot of these comment spams and stupid pings are automated, but I just have to laugh nonetheless.

Anyone dumb enough to spam a spam site deserves what they are getting. And what they are getting is added to a blacklist, and I pull no punches. Even if I only cleaned them up once a month, everything is moderated, so all the spams are useless until I get around to trashing them. And even if I never trashed them (which I only do to keep the database clean), Spamroll runs “no follow” anyway.

In summary: To all you spammers, you are just wasting your time (and really not wasting much of mine, as it only takes about five minutes per week to make you disappear).

Movable Type has a new version of their blog software now in beta. Included in the latest feature set are a variety of admin tools, and a new comment/trackback spam filtering system. The new spam enhancements are supposed to work like traditional Bayesian spam filters, scoring comments and trackbacks according to relevance, and dropping the garbage into a junk folder.

I’ll send over a report after testing, post-beta of course.

To anyone who has received a load of comment spam on their blog, what PC World found surprising will come as, well, no surprise.
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I came across this post from A Whole Lotta Nothing, which struck a familiar cord: Blogspot is hurting America. Well, I am not sure how much it is “hurting America”, but it certainly seems like it could be hurting bloggers.

Is the Blogger product really being used by spammers to game Google search results? Does Google know this is going on, and if so, are they doing anything about it? They are in the same building, aren’t they?

Seems like a simple solution could work as follows…
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Adrants posted this quicky (see Adrants: Weblogs Are The New Spam) regarding a report by Dave Sifry of Technorati, pointing out blogs as the latest spam culprit. They used the term “horrifically depressing” right at the front of the post, for additional FUD factoring.

Thank goodness Dave responded, to clarify matters.
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It seems the blogging community is trying to “fight” back in the comment spam battle. There is a concerted effort in progress to increase the Google PageRank of Wikipedia for the term “online poker.” Somehow, bloggers feel if they can increase Wikipedia’s PageRank, that the spamming of their blogs will stop.

Is this a viable effort, or a show of infantile force? I think there are several issues at hand here.
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