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The Man With The Plan to End Comment Spam
This morning I am riding the ferry over to Seattle and the two cans of Japanese coffee that I had this morning has set my mind to high gear thinking about a problem that is starting to face all successful and moderately popular weblogs and eZines.
Comment Spam
Spammers are a vile wicked folk who are with without morals or manners. As soon as some one will create a new tool and method for communication on the internet the spammers will think about how to pervert and subvert tool to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids with ads for pills, porn and snake elixirs
Now comment spammers are not the same thing as comment trolls. But the methods that would solve one problem could be applied to solve the other. Right now all that there is in Movable Type my choice in CMS online publishing tools to fight comment spam is the ability to require an email address and name in order to post a comment and mild IP address banning. The problem with these two tools is that the name and email address can be easily lied to it is possible to get false positives when banning non-static IP addresses. The problem when you ban an IP from a dial up ISP is that once that person logs on again they are given a different but similar IP address and the person who is now assigned that IP address that you banned can not post to your comments. This is a false positive and that can be more offensive to your readers than allowing some prick to post comment spam.
The GW Bush's 2004 election campaign just created a blog-like online publication but there is no way to send comments or feed back because if they did they would be overwhelmed with negative feedback from all over the world.
So how can we stop spammers from abusing comment?
I think the solution lies in having the option to require that comments be submitted to the CMS system and be published on the site when approved by the weblogs author or moderator. The reader would fill in the comment form just as it is currently but they will get a message saying that their comment will be posted as soon as it is approved by the site's moderator. This might end the real time chat room like quality of comment on weblogs but I think it is worth changing in order to empower the blog author to review and control what is said on their website. The BBC News uses a similar system when they ask for reader feedback. You fill out a form and submit your comment and it is approved or denied in a matter of hours just like a letter to the editor in a newspaper.
Now there are three kind of people who post comments on my eZine.
1. Reoccurring readers who read your site often and comment often. These are the people who it would be nice if you could trust them to post a comment and have it appearer instantly.
2. People who find your site from a search engine and are not regular readers but want to post a comment.
3. Spammers, trolls and minions of The Goblin King of the Labyrinth.
It would be great if future versions of MT would have a reoccurring reader could register with your site use a cookie to identify them on a reoccurring visit. This would be similar to most online commerce sites but would not require encryption or a secure connection. We do not have to make it absolutely impossible to post comment spam just much harder that it currently it.
These suggested changes would be optional and people who wanted to have their comment the current way are welcome to do just that. This would be a killer feature in Movable Type Pro and I would be glad to pay money to have these tools in my CMS. The way it currently is I will check my website several times a day to catch a comment spammer and delete their post as soon as I can but you can never do it in time and you have to watch your website like it was a pot boiling on the stove. If comments were submitted and had to be approved then I could spend the day away from the computer and know that penis enhancement selling con-artists in Shanghai are going to subvert my website to sell their crap. This would also help prevent people from talking about illegal and inappropriate topics on your website's comments. I bet you that this post will attract comment spammers because I mentioned penis pills.
Every print publication in existence has control over what letters on the editorial page and ads that are displayed in their publication. I don't think that these would be seen as tools of censorship that infringe on people's freedom of speech. The way I look at it they are welcome to start their own site and say whatever their heart's desire on it I just don't want people pushing penis pills on my website.
I don't think that these tool would be too hard to implement into MovableType and now that TypePad is live hopefully Six Apart will look at what features they will include in Movable Type Pro. This would be much easier to implement than post by email or photo galleries and would restore control to the weblog authors.
The success of an online tool is proportional to the amount that spammers will abuse it.
Jake at October 11, 2003 
WebDev
Comments
ok, so what about cms's like pmachine?
Posted by: lilly at October 11, 2003 1:05 PM
Should have the same problems as MT i think. I will look into it.
Posted by: Jake at October 11, 2003 1:14 PM
I sell herbal Viagra, if anyone's interested. If you act in the next 15 minutes, I'll throw in a U N I V E R S I T Y D I P L O M A.
Although I don't use it, I keep up with the Movable Type features, and if spam comments become widespread, I'm sure the MT guys will give the users some tools to combat it. I'm impressed with the features they put in their software. Most people don't even know they have some of the features. (Like the sites I have RSS feeds setup for in my newsreader, but they have no links for the XML feed on their site)
Posted by: Jeff at October 11, 2003 10:01 PM
Comment spam is becoming a serious problem...I've already paid to register MT, and would happily pay more for MT Pro if it had some kind of whitelisting spam protection.
Posted by: jason at October 13, 2003 7:01 AM
I use Typepad & don't yet have the problems you describe (thank god). But I have had a few blokes leave expletive laden rants. And I even have the Blogcritics's site administrator leaving unwanted comments due to a dispute I've had with their site.
TP has comment banning but it's based on IP addresses. It's so easy for an unwanted commenter to go around IP banning it isn't even funny. THis guy has left three commments even though I've banned every IP he's used to come at me.
I like your proposal for having the blog author certify the comments before they're posted.
What I'd like to see happen is banning someone from even visiting your site, let alone banning their comments.
Posted by: Richard Silverstein at December 9, 2003 9:20 PM
Well MT-Blacklist really helps keepsthe profesional spammers out. It is not perfect but it is a good start.
Posted by: Jake at December 9, 2003 9:28 PM
