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July 20, 2004
Can Spam
Lately I have been getting plagued by comment spam. This is where shady online merchants advertise their site by posting comments to my entries. I guess this is a plague infecting the entire blogging nation, and it really disgusts me. Some blogs I have read went as far as to post things saying “Please stop spamming; you are ruining this site for everyone. I may quit writing if this continues.” To me this is the equivalent of sending a response to one of those male enlargement emails you get 700 times a day asking them to stop sending it to you. They probably aren’t going to read it, and if they do they will be happy to see that it is a valid email address and be sure to add you to the list of confirmed positives.
Luckily the software I use (Movable Type 3.0 y’all) has a few ways to deal with this. There is the obvious comment deleting and IP banning features, but since the spammers can change their IP addresses (or even develop virus bots that use people’s PCs to write them) both of these require me to take action each time the spammer spams. As long as the comment spam remains limited to a few instances each week I will probably just keep doing this, since I have way too much time on my hands anyway.
If however the spam increases (as I have every reason to believe it will) I will be forced to use a more proactive solution. Movable Type now has a feature called TypeKey, which would require users to register once before commenting. This registration would allow them to comment on any MT powered site. I doubt any spammers would go so far as to register (since the registration is bot-resistant) and even if they did it would drastically reduce the amount of times I had to ban them.
I really don’t want to implement this because I like the comments I get from readers. I know from my statistics that only a small percentage of readers actually comment. Just like most forums there are dozens of lurkers for every one active participant. I would hate to do something that would discourage people from commenting, since I would like to see more people voice their opinions. So I am going to hope that it does not come to this, but in the end it probably will. Hopefully I can delay the inevitable for a while, or maybe some act of Congress will miraculously imprison all spammers, though I think I would be better off relying on humankind’s good nature than the government, which is to say that I am screwed.
Posted by themaroon at July 20, 2004 12:52 PM
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