Stopping Comment Spam For Good

The Google Blog announces the new initiative to stop comment spam. Ben writes about its support in all Six Apart products, and Jay Allen has a few comments as well.

Of course this is a good thing. I’ve already installed the plugin here, so although zero spammy comments have made it to my live pages in the months since I upgraded to MT3, there is now absolutely no incentive for spammers to hit my site.

But they don’t really know that. Hosted services like typepad and blogspot will probably see a fairly immediate reduction in spam traffic, but the spammers will continue to hit MT installations, looking for the weak link. The short- to medium-term will probably continue to be painful, with concentrated spam attacks against MT sites. But perhaps in the long run, spammers will realize the futility of the enterprise and move into other arenas (where brilliant people will again waste thousands of hours trying to figure out how to beat them).

Now somebody needs to figure out how this technique can be applied to the problem of wiki spam.

January 19, 2005 - 09:20 AM