The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

The world Wide Spam Web

This is written in the context of weblog spam, but it applies to places such as JoS all the same. Nothing new, but still a good rant by Mark Pilgrim.

"The low barrier is exactly the problem here. We got away with it (please, come post random links on my site which is well indexed, poorly managed, and open to unlimited anonymous contributions!) because we were collectively very young and naive and thought no one could hurt us. Now it’s like we’re turning 30 and being told we need to go on a diet and asking, “Well when can I go back to my old eating habits?” Um, you can’t. Your old eating habits don’t work anymore."

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/11/15/more-spam
by way of http://www.larkware.com/Articles/TheDailyGrind229.html

Just me (Sir to you)
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

You can no longer read entries on Mark's blog using a browser.

I don't understand what the big problem is with getting rid of comment spam - the comments on my blog have never been indexed, courtesy of the robots.txt file. I don't see it as a great loss.

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

John, I think you're recalling Mark's previous redesign attempt that involved a necessary click through to "Latest" to view his blog entry. That has since been removed and he's back to a typical "blog up front" page.

A robots.txt file might prevent Google from making use of the comments for pagerank, but the spammer might not be aware and keep at it. Do you advertise the robots.txt file's block on your comments file?

Lou
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Exactly. My comments are not indexed. I don't have referer logs visible. I don't have formmail.pl.

Yet my site gets attacked against all of these, a different attack every few weeks.

I don't even know how people find my site. Well, it does have an extraordinarily high google rank for some unusual searches, but I don't think the few people who find it that way are the same as the spammers.

mb
Tuesday, November 18, 2003

I guess I've just been lucky so far then.

I get a 403 if I click on that diveintomark link.

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Wednesday, November 19, 2003

TBH I don't think you are missing much, John. As far as I can see the article complains a lot, tells people how hard life is, and... that's it.

Wednesday, November 19, 2003