Oy, getting whacked with Comment Spam. Some thoughts:
there wouldn't be much motivation for this if it weren't for Goo Gle 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 Lazy Web...
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
<b>mini-d</b> --2004/02/09 13:27 GMT<br> 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 --]'
<b>ht://Dig</b> --2004/02/09 19:43 GMT<br> 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...
<b>Some hacks here</b> --Bill Seitz, 2004/02/10 18:27 GMT<br> 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 Goo Gle could try.