Spam Rapidly Increasing In Weblog Comments 387
dsurber writes "BBC News has a nice article discussing 'flyblogging', the phenomenon of spammers leaving advertising-related posts on personal weblogs. The writer comments: 'None of the other blogs I contribute to or run has been affected yet, but I can only assume it is a matter of time before the spammers move in, as they did first with UseNet and then with e-mail. It depresses me to think that any open medium can be so easily undermined by people with no scruples, no sense of responsibility and no idea of the damage they are doing.'" It seems a little surreal that people are having to develop anti-spam weblog tools.
Wikis too? (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's My Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
I've Noticed (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, try disabling comments altogether... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not every single web site needs to be a two-way communication system. That's what email and discussion groups are for.
Re:Mod (Score:2, Insightful)
Why let users comment on your blog at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't it?
I think the whole "open forum" thing is overrated... Look at all the junk that gets published here, on Slashdot, one of the more serious of the open forums (yeah, I know how crazy THAT comment is, but it's true).
I've been seeing this for months (Score:3, Insightful)
It's frustrating on so many levels. The spammer always sees a hit from your website in their logs if you do a background check on the user (you have to visit the site in order to realize it's spam), so the insentive to spam is reinforced. On the other hand, you run the risk of deleting a user who is truly interested in your site if you don't investigate their profile information.
Unfortunately, it's really easy to use google to find phpbb based sites, and it's just as easy to write a script to register yourself with all of these sites. The signal to noise ratio is making it hard for me to justify the admin time costs of running a public site.
The other (not as easy) solution is to modify your site code in some non-standard way so that their scripts fail.
An interesting double standard re: spammers (Score:1, Insightful)
I find it bitterly amusing that
Solutions (Score:3, Insightful)
One blog I frequent -- Samizdata [samizdata.net] (a libertarian site) -- was recently hit with this kind of stuff. They've initiated a technology that forces people to enter a code supplied on the comments page before being allowed to post a comment.
Slashdot's moderation feature may also help with this problem. If the spammer's goal is to be seen, rather than just Googled, moderating down spam as offtopic or some other negative category may help reduce that visibility.
Re:I've Noticed (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those simple-sounding, and utterly worthless "solutions".
You see, you can stop buying what the spammers are offering, but will everybody else? You see, this world is chock-full of people who just don't get it when it comes to spam. They don't realize the mechanical nature of SPAM, many think the message was sent by somebody to them personally.
Scams were common in the 20th, 19th, 18th, 15th, and 11th century, why would they stop now?
So, really, what you in fact just said was " The solution is simple: change human nature for every person on the earth to a very cynical nature and then spend billions of dollars in education so that people know what SPAM is and how best to treat it, and they will go under soon after."
Utopia doesn't exist, and won't as long as there are people to pollute it. In the meantime, we have to deal with the fact that this world has both unscrupulous people and suckers.
The solution is to change the protocol of Email to introduce enough resistance to communication to thwart SPAM. Until that happens, SPAM will be a problem.
Re:Why let users comment on your blog at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't it?
Yes, but in many cases so also will the blog's audience go away.
One of the key atttractions of small-to-middle-sized weblogs is the interactivity. If the blog author says something incorrect, you can let him know. If you have additional information pertaining to something a blogger wrote about, you can share it with her.
Without comments, blogs are just another one-way communications medium. Not to say that's an undesirable thing, but we already have plenty of those.
Re:Legislation (Score:3, Insightful)
Would you like to be notified when the U.S. becomes a military state, or would you rather be thrown up against the wall when the time comes?
Every day I wish people would stop putting more and more control of their daily lives into the hands of Uncle Sam. Remember, the more control the government has, the less control you have.
Re:This is why... (Score:1, Insightful)
Just think of what the trolls from here would do with something like this.
Re:This is why... (Score:3, Insightful)
With the massive adoption of programs like Moveable Type, the spammer's jobe becomes easier, since they only have to locate a new MT site and point their bots at it. Its pretty pathetic that they're even doing this, but not more than I'd expect from a bunch of bottom-feeders.
My solution (Score:4, Insightful)
my solution? Have MySQL log IP addresses along with the comment submission. My intended audience is so small I know the majority of the viewers personally, and thus have no issue walling off an entire ISP ( after reporting that IP address to said ISP's abuse dept)
Re:Don't be rediculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I have a quick and dirty solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
That excludes people who prefer to browse using text, which is what that image recognition filter effectively does. Blind people, low bandwidth folks are automatically eliminated from the community.
Requiring a periodic human response at the other end of a live email address, after a time interval, helps some. It's still possible for spammers to cultivate a temporary reputation of responsibility and spam a site as their last post, but requiring them to periodically exert effort to prove they're authentically human helps to make spamming hard work.
It wouldn't hurt for sites to start keeping a growing list of bad urls and poisoned posters. A spider that visits url's, maybe one or two deep after the posted URL (phenomena of delayed appearance of herbal viagara behind URLs that are opaque looking), checks for spam links, and assigns big negative karma would help some, especially if it runs before the posting appears on the blog.
Re:An interesting double standard re: spammers (Score:3, Insightful)
Enlighten me, please, how does buying Viagra support the Internet?
I think you are confusing two issues here. On one side, you have the Web sites I want to visit and products I want to buy. I am fully aware that nothing is for free, and because of that I don't complain about banners or fees, if the Web sites contain information I want to access. In fact, when the site is really helpful to me, I click on banners even though I have not the slightest interest in the products advertised, only to increase the site's revenues.
On the other side, you have Web sites and products that I don't want to buy. I don't visit those sites, and I don't buy such products. As such, I don't own them anything, and thus I do my best to fight against their aggressive marketing campaign. If anything, they put additional burned on the Internet infrastructure without paying their share to "support the 'net" (if there is such a concept in the first place).
this is just a taste of our doom (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll save you a bit of surfing by extracting a tasty morsel, but do glance over the rest as it is quite a classic:
[snip] [endsnip]
The key insight here is that freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. So in other words, we kid ourselves into thinking that our tiny individual impact does not make a difference, that societal good is not impaired, thus we have the freedom to pursue our impulses to better our share, and working individually this way we ruin everything that does not have a high barrier to entry. The way this applies to email/weblogs/Usenet/etc is that in the beginning the technical hurdles are too high for there to be very many users with thier little impacts, so the Commons is safe for a while. But then comes the GUI and push-button bots and the Commons is swamped. The normal "natural" balance is broken apart and the Commons collapses from the death of a thousand cuts. It has ever been thus, and unless I am mistaken it always will be unless you defend your Commons from newcomers. Which has been tried. [gbso.net]
Re:Don't be rediculous (Score:2, Insightful)
Colin, I just visited your blog, and have just been treated to the textual equivalent of the Goatse guy, i.e., your description of yourself taking a shower.
etc.
Dude, I nearly Elvis'd my monitor. It's like the poster child for all that is cliche and pedantic and self-absorbed about blogging. Keep this up and you won't have the "necessary audience" for a game of bridge, let alone a valid user moderation system.
And you're accepting paypal donations?!? I sit in mute awe and fascination.
Is this what blogging is about? Really? Online personal diaries about one's daily minutiae? There's got to be more effective therapies available. A weekly pint at the corner pub with friends, popping bubble-wrap, I dunno, something...