Adam Kalsey says it:
Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You've picked a fight with us and it's a fight you cannot win.
And you know what? He's right--at least for the most part. It seems to be that the majority of new bloggers are not so technically savvy, but that probably doesn't matter. Most are probably using hosting services like TypePad. Search engines are pretty smart about discounting links that all come from within a single domain.
That means blog comment spammers have to go after those that have their own domains. When they do, the odds of them hitting someone who's a lot smarter about fighting spam increase quite a bit I think.
Posted by jzawodn at November 08, 2003 11:45 PM
You may be smarter, but that's not going to stop them from being persistent, adaptive, and generally a PITA. You ain't see nuttin' yet.
Get your torches here!
Pitchforks for sale!
The next lynch mob leaves in ten minutes!
(Oops! Is that spam?)
Let the beatings commence!
True, fighting spammers is hard work. That's why I've introduced my advertisement policy. The funny thing is that they keep entering in less than pleasant things about the companies they're trying to market. I wonder why...
This isn't a matter of smarter. The spammers always win because we aren't as stupid as they are. Only a truly demented idiot would think up some of these blog spam schemes. A sane, rational human just can't anticipate all of the abuses a spammer would commit. Here's a good example, I'll post the munged address to avoid a hot link, you can cut out the *s and paste it together:
http://all*ergy-treatment.blog*spot.com/
This is a link farm, a system of websites that link to each other to increase the pagerank of a shady online pharmacy. I clicked around their web of links, and I really couldn't find any end of their link farm. I was pretty shocked to see how widely the link farm spread across dozens of addresses within the free Blogspot webspace. Some maniacal spammer sat down and added links on all the websites, every day, for weeks on end, in a scheme to drive a few more hits from Google. Who could be so demented as to cook up a scheme like this, with so much labor for so little return? And how could anyone at Blogspot have forseen this abuse, let alone implemented security measures to keep it from happening? How the hell would you stop this NOW? You could shut down the farm sites and they'd just open new ones, the free BlogSpot system is totally open.
JZ you gotta do something about that Postgres (and anti-mysql) guy before I hunt him down and smite him. Seriously.
