Mark Pilgrim on weblog spam

Mark Pil­grim posts a harsh, but true, com­ment to the whole blog com­ment spam thing. A good sum­mary can be found else­where, but his point is that no one has ever really stopped email and Usenet spam, so despite the com­mon belief that the weblog com­mu­nity is some­thing dif­fer­ent; peo­ple who won’t put up with it and is ready to do some­thing about it, we shouldn’t get our hopes up, espe­cially as spam­mers are doing what they’re doing 24/7 — and doing it for a reason.

Unfor­tu­nately he’s quite right. What he misses though, in my hum­ble opin­ion any­way, is that ordi­nary spam seeks to tar­get the end user — blog com­ment spam (for now any­way) is made to increase Google rank­ings. Which means sev­eral things:

First of all, it means that a sim­ple solu­tions like MT-blacklist works for me as well as for any other “I-don’t-have-a-lot-of-traffic” blog own­ers as we are sim­ply not that inter­est­ing. Even if spam­mers can buy truck­loads of kids for peanuts to man­u­ally pass Tur­ing tests, it has to be bad busi­ness to do so, as minor sites don’t have any real prob­lems delet­ing spam before pages are vis­ited by robots.

And yes, spam­mers are buy­ing more domain names as we speak and host­ing a list (just a small, 3-page list) will even­tu­ally cost loads of money if the whole world are down­load­ing con­stantly, but in the near future there will hope­fully be some sort of cen­tral­ized way of doing this; one reg­is­tra­tion — no spam­ming. I’m well aware of the pit­falls and the big money involved in this, but I’m quite pleased with recent court rul­ings, slowly mov­ing towards tak­ing a stand.

And I wouldn’t write off the weblog com­mu­nity just yet. Email spam is hap­pen­ing, but the com­mu­nity feel­ing has to be just a tad bet­ter than among email users, blog­gers own their own lit­tle plat­forms, hope­fully giv­ing them the advan­tage of exper­i­ment­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing. And: If we all just take the time to close com­ments on older posts (it should be easy to imple­ment “if you want the dis­cus­sion re-opened, mail me”), con­sider if we need them on new posts at all and gen­er­ally work on how to do some sort of spam fil­ter with­out mak­ing inter­ac­tion too dif­fi­cult, I sin­cerely hope that we’ll all be able to make it as hard for the spam­mers of the evil empire as pos­si­ble. Some mights say, that peo­ple with bad inten­tions and/or more money always win in the end. I don’t buy it — we’ll always out­num­ber them, it’s just a ques­tion of priorities.

Update: Maybe this approach, found on Slash­dot, is worth a shot?