vapourtrails.ca

One of the first plugins I wanted to write for WordPress was a decent spam filter. At the time (late 2004) there were several plugins already out there, but they were all rules-based and I wanted something more adaptive. So I wrote a few simpler plugins for practice and soon abandoned the idea, since I really didn’t get much spam — or even many comments for that matter.

After a seven month absence, I came back here to find over 4000 comments in moderation, most of it spam. It took a week to sort through and clean that mess up, all to preserve the 5% of legitimate comments buried in there. Then after a 2 week vacation, I was stunned to see my empty moderation queue back up to 2700 comments. No rest for the wicked, I guess. (more...)

Google recently announced support for a new link tag: rel=”nofollow”. When Google indexes your site, any links that are tagged with nofollow don’t receive a PageRank boost from your link. This is intended to reduce the incentive for comment spammers.

Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon: Six Apart has implemented nofollow for Moveable Type & TypePad; and the latest CVS for Wordpress already includes nofollow despite a raging debate on the hacker’s list about it’s use.

I don’t think nofollow is going to save interactive sites from comment spam. It’s a nice gesture but it really doesn’t address the root cause of spam. (more...)