Added support for the rel="nofollow" attribute to my .Text installation...
Google and various blog software vendors recently announced a method to deter comment spam by reducing its benefit to the spammer... it sounds like a pretty good idea, so I updated my installation of .Text to use this new attribute in the comment section by adding just a single line within comments.cs: namelink.Attributes["rel"] = "nofollow"; ... now, let's just hope it works ;)
I think I might enhance this a bit later, adding the idea of approved comments that don't get this attribute for their links, since I see no reason why a non-spammer's comment shouldn't give them google-juice. That feature is likely a ways into the future, but you never know.
2 Comments
Derek Lakin said
Sean, although some (if not most) of the comment spam is being done by spambots, there are still a large number of determined spammers that seem to be quite happy to do their spamming manually. As an example my blog was spammed just yesterday despite having a HIP-CAPTCHA control on the commenting interface.
Our analysis of spamming at FlexWiki.com also indicates that the spam received there is also being done manually.
Sean Chase said
Maybe I missed the clue train completely on this, but I'm assuming the spammers are doing this programmatically? If so, seems like just doing a javascript confirm would blow their plan? For example, add the following script to the end of PostComment.ascx...
<script language="javascript">
function Confirm()
{
return confirm('Are you sure you want to submit this comment?');
}
document.all("PostComment.ascx_btnSubmit").onclick = Confirm;
</script>