Monday, February 06, 2006

Comment Spam

Father Roderick doesn't like TypeKey because visually impared people can't post. His solution is to make his forum wide open to spammers. He has a big fan following, and a small army of volunteers from around the world check his forum for spam, approximately hourly.

On my own Yahoo Groups, I have moderated registration. In the registration, the prospective new member must pass the Turing test. They have to answer the question, "What is this group about, and why do you want to join it?". If they answer 'I love this group', then they don't get to join. Not all humans are able to act as if they are indistiguishable from a human at a teletype, and they don't get to join. Oh well. So I'm more restrictive than I'd like to be. And yet, I try to have more than one moderator on my groups so that if I get hit by a bus (or something) the group goes on. It's not an army, it's just another active group member or three.

My blogspot and LiveJournal blogs both have open comments. I've not had any spam, which suggests that no one knows these blogs exist. If you're reading this, you've found one of them.

My favorite spammer story is that when a spammer was taken to court and convicted, his home address became part of the public record. Someone (anonymously) wrote a little script to sign him up for 100,000 snail mail catalogs... poetic justice.

3 comments:

freethoughtguy said...

Why not turn off CATPCHA? It would be easier to comment, and with Blogger, you can get instant emails when someone comments. If it is a spam comment, just delete it.

I've never used CATPCHA, and while spam comments were a bit of a problem in 2005, I have only received valid comments this year! And none of them had to use CATPCHA! (hint, hint)

Stephen said...

I thought it was off. Now it is. We'll see how it works.

Stephen said...

I get form spam, like, 'I didn't see what I wanted here, but here's a way to make money'. Just for the record, if, for example, you mention a dollar amount, like $900, and my original post was on finger math, it's still off topic, and i WILL delete it.