Comments on: Rel=”nofollow” Follow Up

By: Hanspeter

Hanspeter — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 12:07:23 +0000

The only problem with downloading the linked site is that it can affect page views, particularly important with regards to ads on that page. A page with ads will register page views and then money will be exchanged between the advertiser and host site. So if I was a spammer, I would spam my site everywhere, then all those blogs will download my site to verify its non-spammyness, and my ad hits will skyrocket, making me money from the advertisers.

Softcoding the comment.cgi URL and using a sessionID as well in the URL is probably the best way mentioned. It’s a little more resource intensive because it then requires more database hits to compare who’s using the URL, but it’s a small prize. Even more than sessionID, I would use an ID that’s a derivative of the session AND the instance of hitting “Leave a comment” with some expiration time.

Plus it is safer because you’re in 100% control of everthing in the process, avoiding any unintentional consequences from using 3rd party content (foreign page).

heh. I just noticed this post is a year old :)

By: Al

Al — Tue, 15 Feb 2005 06:07:34 +0000

That is a pretty similar stand point to what I take on the matter as well Scott. I honestly believe that if it wasn’t either cost effective for spammers, that would initially kill off a significant volume of them. If the huge rewards for people to spam was removed as well, then clearly it would die off as there wouldn’t be a good reason for them to continue.

I suppose the reality of it is, as long as money can be made through the internet, then there will always be some reason for them to spam. Our job will be to continually make it harder and harder for them to do it efficiently.

I’ve been pondering writing a couple of different plugins for WordPress to test some of these thoughts out. The one I’m quite interested in, is pulling down the linked site and scanning it for keywords. Chances has it, that if it is a spammer the site will be related to porn, gambling or drugs of some sort. If you get x number of positive hits for it, you either don’t display the post at all, don’t link the URL or link the URL with rel=”nofollow” (I’d prefer to not link it period to be honest).

Have you considered any new sorts of anti-spam type mechanisms at all?

By: Scott Yang

Scott Yang — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:48:24 +0000

I think fighting spam is all about maximising spammers’ effort thus minimising their profit. Hopefully by making spamming not cost effective, it’ll gradually die down. For example, eliminating automation of spamming by require some kind of human intervention (enter in text in gif, confirmation email, random sanity-checking questions, etc). Slow down the rate of spamming (compulsory delay in the script, throttling, etc). Content filtering (spammy words filtering, RBL-style central database, etc).

Or alternatively, maybe we should just have a law that heavily penalise the spammers :)