[Population: One] <A HREF="http://popone.innocence.com/ar

[bryant]

If you keep a blog, this is important. You should read it and take heed. If you use Typepad or LiveJournal, you're covered (or will be soon). If you use Movable Type, see this post. If you use Blogger or Blogspot... um, I dunno, but since it's a Google initiative and Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google, I imagine support will come pretty quickly.

Now, this isn't going to stop spammers from spitting out comments all over your blog. It will make them less likely to benefit from those comments. It would be nice to think that less benefit means less spam, but let's be serious -- the people selling the software that generates this spam aren't going to tell their customers that it's a worthless activity. Still, you're cutting back on whatever money spammers are making, and that's a good enough reason to do it in my book.

Comments

[chris-goodwin.livejournal.com]

Jerry Pournelle says, and I tend to agree with him, that the spam problem will continue until it becomes legal to do something physical and permanent to spammers.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

You know, I hit a moderate number of blogs/online journals etc, and I'm not sure if I've ever really noticed comment spam. Where is this a big problem?

[mcurry.livejournal.com]

Hmm....wasn't there already some other change introduced to MT that used a redirect to make links in comments useless to spammers?

[bryant]

Welp, you don't see it on my blog cause I delete a few hundred comments per week. Here's what happens when you don't:

http://captology.stanford.edu/notebook/archives/000074.html

[bryant]

The redirects only happen on the URLs entered in the URL field of the comment form -- URLs in the comment itself don't cause redirects.

[mcurry.livejournal.com]

If you don't notice comment spam, it usually means that the owner of the blog is spending a lot of time and effort getting rid of it. My blogs, which are hardly popular, get lots of comment spam on a regular basis, and that's just the stuff that makes it through MT BLacklist.

[mcurry.livejournal.com]

Ah, okay....that'd explain why the new plugin is actually useful. Thanks.

[bryant]

Bah. That's the kind of rhetoric that warms the cockles of the heart but which doesn't actually help much.

I mean, seriously. So I spend maybe half an hour a week dealing with comment spam. That's justification for hurting someone? I think not.

[telepresence.livejournal.com]

Wow. Alrighty then, I stand corrected.

[st-rev.livejournal.com]

Is wasting half an hour of time for a thousand people equivalent to kidnapping someone and forcing them to work for you for three months?

[head58.livejournal.com]

I had a message board on a website I used to run (before I gave up the domain name and a week later it was a tranny pr0n site. No lie.) we got so much spam it was amazing. We could have had our pick of Russian mail-order brides, any day of the week!

[bryant]

Nah. There's a difference that lies somewhere in the degree to which each situation interferes with how one might want to otherwise spend one's time. (One: minimally, the other: greatly.)

But OK, the problem is not just wasting half an hour of my time, it's the aggregate time.

Wait...

[bluegargantua]

...how is the supposed to work? Do you put the nofollow attribute in the HREF link iteslf? How will this stop spammers? They certainly wouldn't do it and if you had to manually add it in, why not just delete it.

And it still doesn't quite solve the spam problem since the comments may still appear to generate traffic (if not search engine boosts).

Tom

Re: Wait...

[bryant]

Let's say you type <a href="http://innocence.com/">buy cialis</a> into my comment text box. Internally, Movable Type adds the ref="nofollow" element and you get <a ref="nofollow" href="http://innocence.com/">buy cialis</a>.

It certainly doesn't solve the problem completely, especially since not everyone will update their old blogs. There are vast fields of blogs out there doing nothing, never updating, just having tons of spam comments show up. People abandon blogs and don't shut 'em down.

But it's something.

[drivingblind.livejournal.com]

I deal with a ton of it on the Jim-Butcher.Com website, but thankfully it's largely caught by MT-Blacklist. Still, I've tossed this plugin in (hopefully correctly). Thanks for the pointer.