Blogging comment spam is about to destroy blogging as we know it. Jay Allen has started an open source, vendor-neutral anti-BCS project called Blam, and Mark Pilgrim warns him that it is all in vain. [via Padawan] Is the open commentary of the blogging community going the way of Usenet? (I remember the day that green card amnesty spam showed up on Usenet.) Blacklists don't work or are merely a stop-gap measure. Turn off comments: that'll work, but it's too impersonal and blogging folks need their feedback. Turn the blog into a gated community or an by-invitation only kind of country club: not immediate enough. How do you let a growing community interact with itself?
Posted by jim at November 16, 2003 09:09 AM | TrackBackActually, the blacklist's been working well for me.
*knocks on wood*
Yes, me, too, but ...
Posted by: jim on November 16, 2003 09:38 PMPerhaps a little overstated. I think that the problem is with this monoculture of MoveableType commenting systems which have become too easy a target for automated attack. The solution I think is to encourage diversity in the user interfaces, something that humans can deal with perfectly well but screws it for brain-dead spamming bots.
An analogy is with operating system monocultures, is Microsoft Windows the malware writer's preferred target solely because it is buggy and insecure or has it something to do with having 90% of desktop marketshare? Without diminishing the important contribution made by the former argument , my money is with the latter.
Posted by: John Hardy on November 17, 2003 02:45 AMObviously I have nothing against comment systems, but "blogging as I know it" was doing just fine before they were widely available.
Posted by: Ray on November 17, 2003 11:23 AMAnton: So it was, so it was. Why did I remember it as amnesty instead of lottery? Well, 12 April 1994 was quite a while ago in internet years.
Posted by: jim on November 18, 2003 03:22 PM@John Hardy: Diversity in user interfaces won't make the deal, I fear. In the end they all work the same: having a form that is sent over to a CGI-Script that then posts the form's content to the blog. Either spammers then work harder to make better form parsers (they have them, believe me), or they will realize that there is a much easier way to inject spam into blogs: by using Trackbacks. And I guess you don't want to propose to turn of Trackbacks, as this would destroy a major feature of blogging.
And another con for this idea is what Adam Kalsey recently wrote here (his comment, posted November 18, 2003 10:12 AM):
It is a mistake to assume that spam is created by automated bots. The evidence I have here says it is not, but is typed into the forms by humans.
So, instead of taking measures on those who want to comment, we should concentrate on those who spam. I think blacklists are one of the ways to go, and others should join in to bring up some alternatives. This would allow the blogging community to decide which system(s) they want to use / put their trust in.
Bye, Mike
Posted by: Michael Renzmann on November 18, 2003 09:26 PM