16th November 2003, lunch time | Comments (15)
The following post hinges entirely on the premise that Google places no page rank value on un-linked, plain text URLs like this: http://webstandards.org/ as opposed to linked URLs like this http://webstandards.org/. If I’m wrong, please tell me.
Last night I read Mark Pilgrim’s thoughts on the futility of trying to combat comment spam on blogs. I know practically nothing about past fights against spammers, so it was good to get an insight into just how much oomph these shifty-eyed swine have behind them.
Having implemented a blacklist myself last week I guess I’m one of the people Mark labels as thinking they’re special and unique.
I suppose it must be frustrating to see the same battles being fought time and again with no lessons being learnt, but then not all of us are aware of these past fights. I didn’t know even a quarter of what Mark wrote, so I don’t feel bad about giving it a shot this time round.
So, since Mark has knocked some holes in the blacklist method, what else is there left for us to do? The Moveable Type guys have summed up their thoughts on the matter, but don’t really get any further than praising Jay Allen’s work with the Comment Spam Clearinghouse.
Personally, (and leaving the blacklists aside for a moment) I see three main pathways blog owners can follow if they want to allow commenting but still fight spam on their sites:
This is a time consuming solution and, unless you’re poised at your computer 24hrs a day, may break-up the flow of conversation in your comments. However, it does seem to be the only way to ensure spam never finds its way on to your site.
This is where our blacklists fit in. The other option is to try to recognise spam by its format and content, but that isn’t going to work since spammers post perfectly good English sentences, as well as gobbledygook.
If links to other sites weren’t allowed in comments then there’d be no point in posting this kind of spam.
It’s this last idea I’d like to address, though from a slightly different angle.
The main way in which cash-based business try to lower their chances of being robbed is to remove that cash from the premises — they send it to a bank and then publicise the fact. Why spend money on expensive alarms when removing the incentive is a much simpler way of avoiding burglary?
In the same vein, it might be reasonable to think, why would a spammer post a link on your web site if he knew that link would never appear to do its job?
But, I hear you say, a blog that won’t allow outgoing links in comments is going to be a terribly unpopular — links are the lifeblood of the Web. So how is this of any use? Well, I’ll tell you…
My idea goes like this: let all comments be posted to your site straight away (thus avoiding the time-lag that manual reviews take), but let the links within them (excepting internal links to your own site) be rendered as plain text.
Then, when you receive your admin notification email, you (as a human administrator) can decide if the comment is spam or not.
If it is spam then remove the comment.
If it’s not spam then click your OK button and activate all the URLs within the post; turning them from plain text in to clickable links.
Since Google places no page rank value on un-linked, plain text URLs, the spammer’s comment will do him no good in the time between him posting it and you removing it.
And if users really want to visit a link before you, as admin, make it active, then they can always cut-and-paste it into their browsers.
I think this idea would be a fair blend of manual review (where no spam is going to get through), and free-posting (where everything gets through). If we can’t stop spam, can we not neutralise it?
If you wanted you could also combine this with the blacklist technique to remove those obvious spam comments right at the start and save yourself a bit of time.
Any thoughts on this?
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