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 --Bill Seitz, 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.

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