Blog Spam

The blog comment spam problem doesn't seemm to be subsiding - have a look at this post from last week, for instance. This site - my blog and the community blogs really haven't been affected much - there's been a handful of spam over the last year, and it was in ones and twos. There's a pretty simple reason for that - I'm not using one of the popular blogging systems. Now, it's not that any of those systems are at fault - it's that due to their popularity, it's worthwhile for spambot authors to target the comment entry systems of these blogging systems - for exactly the same reasons that there are scads of Windows based viruses and worms, and virtually none for the Mac platform. The target eco-sphere for Windows (or popular blogs) is big enough to warrant bots, while the target eco-sphere of the Mac (or off brand blog systems) is too small.

That's why I get the occasional manually entered (and easy to get rid of) spam comment, but I don't get the absolute floods of spam (like the one mentioned in the link above). Is there a solution to this? Sure, there are plenty of technically feasible solutions (the simplest being to just change the field names in your templates). The difficulty is always in the side effects (common posting tools may no longer be able to "see" your site at all). The various IP based throttles are semi-workable, but blocking that way can be anti-social in the face of proxy servers. The medium term result is most likely going to be a steady decline in the number of blogs with open comment systems...