The general goal
What we do here is come up with blocks that prevents spam from defacing our blogs, guestbooks, forums and other public areas.
The site attracts geeks, and noobs are turned off because they don’t understand what we’re talking about.
But my goal is to prevent spam in the first place. And that doesn’t mean keeping mine and my friends’ blogs spam free. It means getting spammers to stop spamming. It means preventing them from getting the spam to stick. It means preventing the spam to work.
And in order to do that, we need solutions that work even for the noobs. Because noobs have guestbooks (do they ever!), blogs and forums as well.
I have another site, where the visitors come mainly in two flavors: Housewives and actors. There are men too, but many of them are in the biz in some way. And both groups are usually pretty clueless. There’s the occasional geek, but the browser statistics should give you a general idea of the non-geekiness of the visitors: about 85 % use IE, 6.5 % use Firefox. I’ve learned the hard way that anything remotely technical is very difficult. Even getting them to update a wiki page when they’re very motivated (as in helping their career) is beyond most, it seems.
Keep that in mind. Most of the users on the internet are hopelessly lost. They can’t keep their computer working, much less keep spam out of their public areas. Most have no way of putting up a webpage, it’s so beyond them. But even for those who managed to put up some public presence, it’s often beyond them to figure out how to keep it clean.
So solutions must eventually come that makes linkspam financially untenable. Or server side solutions that manage to differentiate totally between people and bots.
So when you hear me say: “That’s not a solution”
you know where I’m coming from?
And whenever a spammer says he will take me off his list, I get annoyed. Because that means he doesn’t want to annoy me, but he has no intention of stopping the spam.
I think three spammers have said they’d stop spamming so far, after having been busted by me and others. One of the spammers reorganized his operation and got others to spam for him instead (the Norwegian). Let’s just say I’m pretty disgusted about that. I’m happy about every spammer that stops, but I’m not happy about the statistics. It’s still way too attractive to spam. And we need to turn the tides, somehow.
I’m of the opinion that the best way to help these people is for the makers of the software in question (Guestbooks, etc) to get more involved in fighting spam.
If your software allows people to come along an leave comments or guestbook entries, it should have, in the default installation, some sort of anti-spam measure. The anti-spam measure should, by default, auto-update itself from a central server.
For that matter, the software as a whole should be able to auto-update itself. We’re in the 21st century here! If you have a web-application which (by definition) is connected to the net, it should be able to auto-update itself without any need for intervention from the end-user…
Very good idea. I just talked to a guestbook app owner, and he was affronted by my insistence that he clean all the blogs. This was a private citizen who’d made such an app, and he didn’t think it fair that he needed to clean everything. He considered that something the guestbook owners should do.
I think, today, every guestbook should, at the bare minimum, have nofollow attributes in the coding.
And the way Dreambook does it is good - they seem to do what you’re talking about.
Yes, more people should follow Dreambook’s example. The majority of end-users can’t or won’t handle the spam problem, therefore it’s vital that the makers of such applications do as much hand-holding as possible. While the task of cleaning up spam is left to the end-user, there will always be spammable sites out there.
Hopefully we’ll see nofollow taken up more and more, which should help…