Comments on: The problems with blog spam http://selberg.org/2006/08/13/the-problems-with-blog-spam/ Erik Selberg's Homepage & Blog Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:53:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 By: Erik Selberg http://selberg.org/2006/08/13/the-problems-with-blog-spam/#comment-2512 Erik Selberg Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:12:10 +0000 http://www.selberg.org/2006/08/13/the-problems-with-blog-spam/#comment-2512 I should re-word that... nofollow is kind of effective as a way for Search Engines to identify and ignore comments. But you're absolutely correct in that there's a price in terms of community effectiveness. Hmmm.... as I think about this, I believe that nofollow is actually turned on for this blog. However, as comments are moderated, there isn't any spam as I kill it. I think I'll go turn that tag off, actually... I should re-word that… nofollow is kind of effective as a way for Search Engines to identify and ignore comments. But you’re absolutely correct in that there’s a price in terms of community effectiveness.

Hmmm…. as I think about this, I believe that nofollow is actually turned on for this blog. However, as comments are moderated, there isn’t any spam as I kill it. I think I’ll go turn that tag off, actually…

]]> By: David Ulevitch http://selberg.org/2006/08/13/the-problems-with-blog-spam/#comment-2507 David Ulevitch Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:36:10 +0000 http://www.selberg.org/2006/08/13/the-problems-with-blog-spam/#comment-2507 <em>It was done to discourage comment spam… spammers wouldn’t spam, because the links wouldn’t be worthwhile. It’s kind of effective.</em> Actually it's totally ineffective and has now been shown to have possible social ramifications that might discourage community participation. The argument goes: part of the payment for me making an insightful comment, linking to related content, and generally increasing the thought pool on your site. This is precisely how attribution in acedemia works. The web is even more suited for this as it's automated. But nofollow punishes me for someone else's misdeeds. This is part of why you (and MSR in general) will probably never understand why Akismet is more effective at dealing with real-world problems than something MSR could churn out. At the recent ISOI meeting the Microsoft presentation on Botnets was laughable. They catch 98% of botnet code they know about. But they only know about a fraction of botnet code (of which they don't even catch 100% !!!)... Do the math on that one, hardly a decent product. -david It was done to discourage comment spam… spammers wouldn’t spam, because the links wouldn’t be worthwhile. It’s kind of effective.

Actually it’s totally ineffective and has now been shown to have possible social ramifications that might discourage community participation. The argument goes: part of the payment for me making an insightful comment, linking to related content, and generally increasing the thought pool on your site. This is precisely how attribution in acedemia works. The web is even more suited for this as it’s automated. But nofollow punishes me for someone else’s misdeeds.

This is part of why you (and MSR in general) will probably never understand why Akismet is more effective at dealing with real-world problems than something MSR could churn out. At the recent ISOI meeting the Microsoft presentation on Botnets was laughable. They catch 98% of botnet code they know about. But they only know about a fraction of botnet code (of which they don’t even catch 100% !!!)… Do the math on that one, hardly a decent product.

-david

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