(2004-02-08) Comment Spam Idea

Oy, getting whacked with Comment Spam. Some thoughts:

• there wouldn't be much motivation for this if it weren't for Google Page Rank

• so Google needs a good way to catch spamming to ignore it from Page Rank

  • here's my idea for them: pick a custom tag for people to surround a chunk of text with, then tell everyone about it. Everyone writing any sort of user-content code just has to wrap the results with that tag, and they'll no spammers will have no reason to bother them. (Assuming spammers would bother to check before spamming...) I guess I'll post this to LazyWeb...

Hmm, if I were a spammer I suppose I'd start my spam entry with a close-tag and end it with an open-tag. But then comment-submit code writers could maybe just strip that out.

Update: see recent Mark Nottingham discussion

mini-d --2004/02/09 13:27 GMT
I vote for a comment, no new tags, nothing that can make validators blows. just a simple comment, like '[!-- NO PAGERANK --]....[!-- END OF NO-PAGERANK --]'

ht://Dig --2004/02/09 19:43 GMT
ht://Dig has a feature like this. You wrap tags around parts of your pages you do not want indexed. It would be nice if ALL search engines, not just Google could do this...

Some hacks here --BillSeitz, 2004/02/10 18:27 GMT
I turned off the feature of letting anyone else Append comments. Hope to back off that soon.

I also went through my traffic report and set up an access rule to block a few IPs, but I don't know whether they're the right one or not...

Update: here's a similar idea from Bernhard Seefeld from Nov'2003 that Google could try.