an end to comment spam
[blog]
posted by tom / January 19, 2005 / 
Good news: Google, Yahoo and MSN have announced an initiative to end comment spam. From now on links with the attribute rel="nofollow" won't be counted by search engines. Blog software will intercept submitted comments and alter all links so that they include this attribute.
For Movable Type users, SixApart has a page explaining all this here. They've issued a plugin that implements nofollow for MT versions 2.661 and 3. Download it here and unzip it into your plugins directory. That should be it! I'll have this implemented here sometime later today.
Comments
so as I understand it, the success of this pretty much is determined by how broadly it is implemented by bloggers. like, if everyone does it then comment-spammers might as well stop, but they don't ever HAVE to stop, right?
Yeah, that's right. But if blogspot, typepad, MSN spaces, Movable Type -- all the big guys -- implement this as a default in their product, it'll cut down on the incentive to spam.
We don't get a lot of comment spam anymore anyway, thanks to MT-Blacklist. It comes in bursts. Hopefully this will remove the motivation for new people to start spamming.
Neat. I get comment spam at a rate of about one per week, so it's no longer a big deal, but every once in a while I get a deluge. That's the only thing keeping me from using a unified email address system.
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