I mean, I want to respond via comments, and I’d like to leave my blog URL for those who may be interested in my own article, but I’m not trying to scam my way into higher Google rankings.

Second, I just read an article at the Six Apart dot com web site, on comment spam, and the last 15 comments (approx.) were porm comment spam.

Third, even here, look up above my comment, what’s up with the classic comment spam “Interesting story, I read almost all this page”????? (and others also questionable)????

New to the WordPress world, but the recent 3.0 issues with MT have given me reason to check out the alternatives (interesting note: while ultimately I’m fine with the way SixApart has responded to the furor, I’m still thinking about jumping ship to WordPress due to performance reasons). Anyhow, this particular thread is one of interest to me not-too-surprisingly. Over in the MT world, James Seng has actually wrote two plug-ins to handle the comment-spam issue – the first was an image-based verification (which Matt has justifiably negged), the latter is a Baynesian filter written in Perl:

http://james.seng.cc/archives/000152.html

While it’s not perfect (check out the update to his post), it might be something worth checking out. (I personally don’t code – while I am interested in starting, I just don’t have the bandwidth right now).

We use Radio UserLand for our ‘blog. This software has a feature that we use extensively that lets us forward email directly to the ‘blog. Thus, if someone wants to make a comment, they have to email us first, we look over the message to be sure it’s something we want in our ‘blog, then we forward it to the ‘blog. It’s the only way I’ve found of keeping 100% of the spammers out of our ‘blog.

We also use if to forward the market research and news that we receive from our Clearing Firm. It has saved me many, many carpal tunnel operations…

This sounds promising. If you then choose the name of the POST vars in the input form by random (so every blog has a unique set of POST variable names) it even gets harder

My comment on this is that it’s a good idea if a person or group will take on responsibility for keeping the blacklist updated and accurate. Spammers have a high turnover on web domains, as a look at any expired domains list will show. That could be a bad thing for some unsuspecting person who purchases the domain later, only to find it blocked everywhere because of a spammer.

I’ve had a somewhat similar experience with a shared server for one of my domains. I was having database problems and my webhost suggested switching to a different server that had CPanel. I made the switch, only to find out the server had previously hosted a spammer and as a result I couldn’t send out email to my registered members. Everything from the monthly newsletter to requests for lost passwords has to be routed through another account. A little research showed the spammer had been gone for many months, but the server remains on blacklist because whoever maintains the list apparently hasn’t updated it in over 6 months.

My previous view of blacklists was very gung-ho, but now I am more moderate and think they are a good idea only if they are responsibly maintained. Better would be something like MethLabs list of P2P “enemies”, where people can post links, vote or comment on them, and block them if they choose.

I really like the idea of busting up the search engine ranking. I get tired sometimes of being spam police for my sites, especially one that is top-ranked in it’s area on all the major engines. I’ve already had to delete “news” and comments submitted to that site that was spam, and pull links that have nothing to do with the subject matter of the site. I would love a way to put them in an oubliette where all their effort was wasted. The only thing that I can think of at the moment would be to deactivate links in comments, or require comments containing links to be reviewed before posting.

What I am bothered about is that Google will miss out on useful information because it’s posted as an (unindexed) comment on someone else’s Weblog, instead of being posted as an article on your own Weblog.

(And yes, naïveté and pessimism are opposite extremes, but technology encourages extremes.)

1.) No Comments

OR

2.) moderate them and as I can tell .073 Has this functionality. I got it working on my test server and am now placing it on my live site (along with a redesign, it’s messy but all there.)

And both these solutions are the same. They both eliminate the ability of the spammer to post any comments. trackbacks should be dealt with in the same fashion. it a pain for those that get a ton of Comment Spam but nothing is going to work better then using your own brain to filter out the unwanted.

First of all, none of the encoding or redirection tricks are going to work, because Google follows them regardless. You should just move on to putting your comments pages in a directory with a robots.txt noindex directive.

mpt’s concern that “asking search engines not to index comment pages would be worse than not allowing comments at all” is a touching, but misguided. If the page is useful and important, Google and the rest will hear about it in places OTHER than our comment sections (ie: people will post about them in clean posts on their own ‘blogs, not just in our comments).