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Yeah. Splog Fighter doesn’t believe in CAPTCHAs anymore so he turned off Blogger’s only real method to fight comment spam. Pretty much all his recent posts get one or two spams just after posting. I suppose spammers are just sitting on the blog search engines looking for new posts.
> “CAPTCHAs … only real method to fight comment spam”
No. Only the guestbook owner approval BEFORE the comment gets published is a real method to fight comment spam. There will be no guestbook spam if the owners care about their property.
Blogger (Blogspot) doesn’t have an option to approve posts before they are visible. That is a solution to the spam problem, but is NOT available on Blogger. But it is still not a good solution, that could be why Blogger doesn’t use it. It takes too much user interaction. Having to approve every post is too much for blogs that get a lot of comments.
> Having to approve every post is too much for blogs that get a lot of comments.
Tell me. How many new entries do the most popular blog you encounter have daily/weekly? We are talking about single blog, not a whole blog farm and a blog owner, not a server administrator…
I think it’s not much more than 10 entries a day and the blog owner would deal with it with no extreme delays.
In the far future I’m going to write my own guestbook PHP engine. Maybe even a blog. I’m thinking about applying a check there, to watch the owner last login time. If the owner hasn’t logged for the said amount of time the guestbook/blog will refuse to add new entries or even better - stop working at all.
Manually approving blog comments sucks. It sucks because it kills the interaction. Visitors will have to wait until the site owner has approved their comments which seriously slows down the discussion. This really isn’t what comments are about IMHO. If we’d all use that we might as well start emailing our comments to the blog owner.
Blogs/guestbooks aren’t designed to permit discussion, for discussion you have chats, forums, NNTP news, Instant Messengers, emails - all of these have (or should have) a person who takes care about it. I’m talking about responsibility - nothing should be left alone and wait for some spammers/h0ck00rs to exploit the system!
You’re driving a car right? Would you left your car with keys inside and engine running and go away shopping? No? Why not? It may be stolen, some kids would want to take a ride and smash few old ladies coming out of the church… Who in that case will be responsible? Will you care to take your keys with you as well as keeping your blog/gb away from spammers? They are criminals, you know?
Internet became a dumpster because local responsibilities (abuse@) don’t care, are greedy of spammers money or are just redirecting complaints to /dev/null. Do you think that Internet deserves one more place that can be easily exploited in the name of faster conversation? (Which, as said above, would be better using different protocol?)
> Not everyone checks their email daily or even weekly
Come on… i live in Poland, for US citizens it’s in the middle of Wild Wild Asia or Africa - we still use a pigeons to send an e-mail. If someone cares to be “logged in” at least once a week then she/he would care about running it’s own blog/gb. Do you think that person who enters the Internet on ocassion for eg. once a month would care about having it’s own piece of blog/site/gb? Do you think that someone blog/gb entries will be so important to the World that it deserves to have an easily exploited hole?
I leave my blog on moderated. But those who’ve been approved by me twice get to post directly in the future. Sure, that could be exploited, but it would be a lot more work for the spammers. And if they start abusing that, I guess the software will be reconfigured to close the hole.
October 2nd, 2005 at 2:40 pm
Ironically, the topic already received commentspam…
October 2nd, 2005 at 3:07 pm
Yeah, I noticed that too. What a wonderful, ironic way to underscore the need for the measures he’s noting!
October 2nd, 2005 at 3:40 pm
Yeah. Splog Fighter doesn’t believe in CAPTCHAs anymore so he turned off Blogger’s only real method to fight comment spam. Pretty much all his recent posts get one or two spams just after posting. I suppose spammers are just sitting on the blog search engines looking for new posts.
October 3rd, 2005 at 8:23 am
> “CAPTCHAs … only real method to fight comment spam”
No. Only the guestbook owner approval BEFORE the comment gets published is a real method to fight comment spam. There will be no guestbook spam if the owners care about their property.
October 3rd, 2005 at 1:01 pm
Blogger (Blogspot) doesn’t have an option to approve posts before they are visible. That is a solution to the spam problem, but is NOT available on Blogger. But it is still not a good solution, that could be why Blogger doesn’t use it. It takes too much user interaction. Having to approve every post is too much for blogs that get a lot of comments.
October 4th, 2005 at 5:03 am
> Having to approve every post is too much for blogs that get a lot of comments.
Tell me. How many new entries do the most popular blog you encounter have daily/weekly? We are talking about single blog, not a whole blog farm and a blog owner, not a server administrator…
I think it’s not much more than 10 entries a day and the blog owner would deal with it with no extreme delays.
In the far future I’m going to write my own guestbook PHP engine. Maybe even a blog. I’m thinking about applying a check there, to watch the owner last login time. If the owner hasn’t logged for the said amount of time the guestbook/blog will refuse to add new entries or even better - stop working at all.
October 4th, 2005 at 10:57 am
> I think it’s not much more than 10 entries a day and the blog owner would deal with it with no extreme delays.
Not everyone checks their email daily or even weekly. They aren’t likely going to log into their blog to check for new comments more frequently.
> If the owner hasn’t logged for the said amount of time the guestbook/blog will refuse to add new entries or even better - stop working at all.
I am sure that feature will be so popular no one will use it.
October 4th, 2005 at 4:17 pm
Manually approving blog comments sucks. It sucks because it kills the interaction. Visitors will have to wait until the site owner has approved their comments which seriously slows down the discussion. This really isn’t what comments are about IMHO. If we’d all use that we might as well start emailing our comments to the blog owner.
Just my 5 cents.
October 5th, 2005 at 6:25 am
Blogs/guestbooks aren’t designed to permit discussion, for discussion you have chats, forums, NNTP news, Instant Messengers, emails - all of these have (or should have) a person who takes care about it. I’m talking about responsibility - nothing should be left alone and wait for some spammers/h0ck00rs to exploit the system!
You’re driving a car right? Would you left your car with keys inside and engine running and go away shopping? No? Why not? It may be stolen, some kids would want to take a ride and smash few old ladies coming out of the church… Who in that case will be responsible? Will you care to take your keys with you as well as keeping your blog/gb away from spammers? They are criminals, you know?
Internet became a dumpster because local responsibilities (abuse@) don’t care, are greedy of spammers money or are just redirecting complaints to /dev/null. Do you think that Internet deserves one more place that can be easily exploited in the name of faster conversation? (Which, as said above, would be better using different protocol?)
> Not everyone checks their email daily or even weekly
Come on… i live in Poland, for US citizens it’s in the middle of Wild Wild Asia or Africa - we still use a pigeons to send an e-mail. If someone cares to be “logged in” at least once a week then she/he would care about running it’s own blog/gb. Do you think that person who enters the Internet on ocassion for eg. once a month would care about having it’s own piece of blog/site/gb? Do you think that someone blog/gb entries will be so important to the World that it deserves to have an easily exploited hole?
Come on… be responsible…
October 5th, 2005 at 6:37 am
I leave my blog on moderated. But those who’ve been approved by me twice get to post directly in the future. Sure, that could be exploited, but it would be a lot more work for the spammers. And if they start abusing that, I guess the software will be reconfigured to close the hole.