Why does't Google do something to combat the comment spam problem? It could even be something as simple as preventing a commenter from posting a comment in a different language than the original post. Or, it could be context-driven. They are SO SMART about delivering context-sensitive ads in Gmail, AdSense and their search engine--why not apply the same technology to comment spam?
Since I hate captchas and moderating my comments, I'll just keep manually quashing them as the spammers post them.
Friday, May 29, 2009
Grr. The Chinese Spammers are Back
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9 comments:
I hate them too. I've had my personal blog wrecked twice by malicious code inserted into comment spam.
This legally blind user appreciates your rejection of captchas. I have enough vision to do them, but just barely, and the more insidious low-contrast ones make me want to pull my hair out.
Tia, if you can't tollerate Captcha or hate moderation... kiddo, I don't know what to tell ya. It's a cold cruel world out there and the spammers are after your $. Would there were a way that we could turn the tables and get their $. ;-)
Thanks for your input, Seth. I never considered that point of view. I just hate making my readers do what I hate to do, myself.
Frances, I just delete them as soon as I see them. And hope that Google is working on the problem.
The one time the Chinese government should censor it fails.
Good point, anon!
Well, I suspect that some of my German friends would be rather put out if they couldn't talk to their German friends in their native language just because they'd made the initial post in English for the convenience of their non-German-speaking friends. {Smile}
I wouldn't mind a way to choose which alphabets my blog would accept, but I'm not sure how that would work in the comment section. {Smile}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin
If I were to develop such a spam-fighting option, I would make it user-configurable. That way, the user could flip a switch on if he didn't expect any non-English speakers at his blog.
The alphabets option is intriguing. The Unicode Character Set is all based on numbers, so it would be easy to block a certain alphabet.
That's a great idea about a language option, Tia. But it probably makes too much sense for Blogger to do, LOL.
Like so many others, there's code in it that I can't delete. I think I'll probably just moderate for a couple weeks until they repel this attack!
I figure we automatically block some alphabets in a way when we refuse to download Chinese(simplified). Surely something more effective could be done a little higher up. {Smile}
Doing it by language would be trickier, I suspect. Computers are set up to know what character set they're using, but they aren't always so clear on what the character set is being used for. {Smile} I learned that when a friend on a newsgroup managed to use the Japanese alphabet to post in English. {pause} That only happened once in my decade and a half or so on the net, so I'm not too concerned about repeats. Besides, if someone started having comments refuse to post because of that, they might recognize the problem and fix it sooner. {SMILE}
Anne Elizabeth Baldwin
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