kasia in a nutshell

I get random crap comments now and then, though usually it's just someone thinking they're being "funny." Usually it's a Google search on something like "i am bored" or "stupid cat" or whatever. Recently there was some asshat who was visiting a lot of weblogs which happen to link to each other (including mine) and posting random garbage on them, but he stopped as soon as all of them were deleted.

It's just dumb kids with nothing better to do.

But I've gotten lots of useful comments via Google search, too, at least on my more technical entries (people asking for clarifications about my current cellphone and iSync, stuff about anaglyph rendering, etc.) so I'm not ready to disallow Google-borne comments just yet. For now I just auto-close comments on entries over a certain time period (right now it's 2 months), though that still does't help with the garbage because anyone who's intent on spamming will just go to the most recent entry to do so.

What I've been trying to do for a long time is marry phpBB with MovableType, since phpBB's comment engine actually has authentication (while still allowing anonymous posting if desired), and deleting comments and banning shitheads is much easier. Unfortunately, the phpBB module documentation is sorely lacking, and nobody on the phpBB mod-writing forum wants to answer my extremely-simple questions about the functionality I need to do this. (It wouldn't even be that hard... all I need is a PHP function for automatically creating a new thread and returning its URL. The rest would be trivial.)

Kasia,

You should talk to Adam Kalsey... he has some interesting points and tips about comment spams like this article:

http://kalsey.com/2003/09/spam_begets_spam/

he should be posting a follow up soon that should cover a good way to get rid of your comment spam... simple answer is to delete the comments that are spam, then turn off comments for those entries...

Yeah, the few times I've gotten posts that were spam, it was also from a Google search. That said, I wouldn't jump right to banning posts from people who got there via a Google search, cause the number of people who end up at my blog via a Google search and make useful comments far outnumbers the ones who spam me.

here's Kalsey's followup post:
http://kalsey.com/2003/10/spam_and_vandals_part_2/

The problem I've seen with simply disallowing future comments on those entries is that the idiots just look for a newer entry (usually the most current one) to spam.

you can use a java script in your template for the comments and so google will not give comments Page Rank. No Page Rank -No Spam.

Please mail if you need a sample with java

Hi there,

At Feedster we started offering a service of a black list for Comment Spammers.

http://feedster.com/commentspam.php

Scott

Javascript or redirect services would help, but you should give some info in order to make it visible to the users.
To block comments that have been initiated by a google search is no solution. At least if you speak about it. there are so many ways around such a google referrer blocker. Use of another search engine, or just copy and paste the url and jump directly to the target page. As long as you provide a link that inherits pagerank and boosts link popularity you will not get rid of this spam plague.
So imho there are only four ways to accomplish such a spam stopper.
- no links
- a link redirect service (that does not inherit pagerank)
- javascript (with some small constraints)
- exclusion from search index (robots.txt, meta tags)