Spam spam spam spam
Sigh. Well, the comment spam has been arriving at the rate of 30 or so per day. Thanks to MT-Blacklist, the spam gets sent to my inbox instead of being put up on the blog. Is that an improvement? Possibly, but it's certainly damn annoying to me. This morning I installed Conversation Killer, which disables comments on old blog entries. That should help enormously.
Links are the coin of the realm on the Internet today, since they drive search engines and the search engines drive traffic. It's no wonder people try to add links wherever they can. Today, the spammers are so inept that we can do basic pattern matching to filter them out. Within a year or two, I'm sure the spammers will base their fake blog posts on text from the blog itself (or a google search on terms from the blog post), making it nearly impossible to automatically identify the spam. This is why comment spam is much harder to fight than email spam.
What are we to do? People talk about using captchas and the like to automatically tell real people from fake people. I'm not a big believer. We could only allow authorized users to comment, but that would take away a good amount of the fun of blogging. No, I think the best solution is what usenet did. Remember usenet? It was all the rage in the 90's, and then it became one huge spam-and-troll party. The solution? Most people gave up on usenet and moved to the web and blogs. Because spammers lag behind the early adopters by a good 2-3 years, changing systems works better than anything else. So, blogs are about to be over. What's next?