Spam Cold War

If you've been using the internet long enough you can remember when spam first became a problem for you. While filtering has taken care of nearly all my email spam, I still have the occasional problem of comment spam on the blog.

To combat comment spam, I have used the MT-Blacklist spam filtering plug-in, closed commenting on old entries, banned repeat offenders, and now even started offering TypeKey authentication. These measures have reduced the comment spam problem to background noise.

I have always thought that if spam didn't pay, the slimy people who send it might spend their time on other pursuits, like say bilking the elderly out of their retirement savings. Unfortunately, spam does seem to pay enough to keep them in the game.

Comment spam is slightly different than email spam. With comment spam, the spammer is trying to use a whole stack of internet software to increase their rank in search engines, and thus drive more traffic to their scam web sites.

Today, I was pleasantly surprised to see in my RSS reader, that the MSN search folks were going to support a novel modifier of the A HTML tag, namely <A HREF="LINK" REL="NOFOLLOW">. The idea being that if comment spammers increase their "pagerank" by polluting blog comments, that search engines would ignore those links with the NOFOLLOW attribute set.

It's a very simple idea, which appears to reduce the incentive for comment spammers to bombard blogger web sites. I don't expect them to change their habits overnight, but perhaps they'll move on once comment spamming is deemed less effective.

After reading the MSN search team blog entry, I thought to myself, "I suppose I could make a plug-in to MovableType to automate that." Tonight when I logged in to my MovableType installation I saw the announcement that there is already a new plug-in available.

The cold war between the forces of good and the evil empire of spammers continues. The first presidential candidate who promises to send the spammers to Gitmo gets my vote.