Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Spam Huntress talks with friendly spammer
Spam Huntress has been discussing things with a "friendly spammer." Well, I am not sure he is actually friendly, but Halz used that term so I will go with it. This admitted spammer thinks he has the solution to solve blog spam and wants to share it with antispammers.
I suspect he thinks he has some real good ideas to prevent spam, but just because he is a spammer doesn't mean he is an expert at knowing how to prevent spam. There are a lot of great solutions to web spam, but most are inconvienant or totally unwanted by users. CAPTCHAs are annoying and only work against automated spamming. Redirects and nofollow means that even legitimate links do not recieve any PageRank influence. I don't really see a big problem with that on blog comments, but apparently many bloggers do. Most wiki users hate it too, though Wikipedia is using it.
What he doesn't get is spammers are morons. Maybe he isn't, but he also isn't the usual Chinese spammer who probably gets paied a few dollars for a day's worth of spamming. We have lots of spammers hit our wiki and many work really hard to get around our spam prevention methods. Usually by posting a text only URL which is not useful for PageRank or getting hits.
I suspect he thinks he has some real good ideas to prevent spam, but just because he is a spammer doesn't mean he is an expert at knowing how to prevent spam. There are a lot of great solutions to web spam, but most are inconvienant or totally unwanted by users. CAPTCHAs are annoying and only work against automated spamming. Redirects and nofollow means that even legitimate links do not recieve any PageRank influence. I don't really see a big problem with that on blog comments, but apparently many bloggers do. Most wiki users hate it too, though Wikipedia is using it.
What he doesn't get is spammers are morons. Maybe he isn't, but he also isn't the usual Chinese spammer who probably gets paied a few dollars for a day's worth of spamming. We have lots of spammers hit our wiki and many work really hard to get around our spam prevention methods. Usually by posting a text only URL which is not useful for PageRank or getting hits.
