Beware of Comment Spam
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Tuesday, October 14, 2003 at 09:03 PM [GMT-6]

Those of you who are bloggers have no doubt been introduced to the latest incarnation of spam, that being the dreck left in posts apparently selected at random. I'm still unsure of how this is being accomplished, but that's neither here nor there. What I am increasingly concerned about is something that's a tad more insidious.

One day last week, one of my older posts attracted two comments, both to the effect of "nice site you have here" or something equally innocuous and irrelevant. Uh, OK. It's not that unusual to get comments that are innocuous and irrelevant. But, then I took a look at the URLs left by the commenters. They were obviously links to a pørn site, an assumption that I didn't bother to confirm (really!), but any URL that combines the terms "ú_ndéråge" and "gírl_s" is pretty much a slam dunk.

We shouldn't be surprised by this development, which is simply another underhanded strategy of the pørn industry for getting people to visit their sites. But this one is particularly tricky given the normal inclination of bloggers for curiosity about their visitors, especially those who take the time to leave comments.

And, by the way, this technique underscores the importance of doing something I've championed for a while now: making your comment window resizable. One of the benefits of being able to resize that window is the ability to quickly see the entire URL left by the commenter. URLs can be contracted into illegibility by the small default comment window size (in Movable Type, anyway). The resizable comment window will make you better able to screen those URLs before clicking.

Oh, and learn to use the IP banning feature!

Update: I've just learned that Jay Allen has created a free MT plugin called MT-Blacklist which is designed to help combat comment spam. [Link courtesy of Outside the Beltway.]