Porn Comment Spammer Is Back

Hi folks -- a few folks have written me to let me know that our
porn comment spammer is back.


This one is the same one we've seen before, except he/she is being
extra annoying, as he/she is throwing in a lot of
additional whitespace around the text, which
is:

Looking for HOT Guys and Sexy BI Females in my
AREA!
I am a 20/F/Pics. View my ADULT Pics profile below!

[URL Removed]

I haven't
included the screen name because the spammer can create a new one
pretty easily.



Why does the spammer do this? It's probably because he/she thinks that

doing this will help increase the search engine ranking of their silly

affiliate porn site, not knowing or caring that
comments in AOL Journals use
the NOFOLLOW tag, which means that your major search
engines (like Google) that rely on links to determine relevance
will skip those links and therefore won't
help your search engine ranking, you big spamming
dummy.

The

tech team is looking at different rostering methods and other measures

against comment spam. (I will talk more about that in a
minute.)



In the meantime, Journalers can use the "Block This Screen Name"
button

to block the screen name and delete all comments by that screen name.


By the way, if you accidentally
block someone from commenting, here's how you manage
your block list:

* When signed in to your
Journal, click the blue "Edit Journal" button.

* In
the section marked "Manage Your Journal Settings", click "Manage
Permissions."

*

This will show you a list of screen names which are blocked from

commenting to your Journal.  You can add screen names, and
also

unblock them.

Now, getting back to the problem of
comment spam:

It's a problem all over the blogosphere, not just AOL Journals. In

fact, to date, we've been pretty "lucky" that we've only had a few of

these clowns.

Different blog providers use different
methods to try to block comment spam -- for example, Blogger and others use
image verification (also known as a CAPTCHA)

-- it's a basically squiggly letters and numbers that machines can't

read, but people can, to try to block automated spamming
robots.

Image

verification works, but it's not a silver bullet -- there are ways

around it, including offshoring low-wage humans to defeat it.






Also, it can be pretty hostile to
visually-impaired humans

(especially with the squiggly lines -- if you've ever asked yourself,

"is that a 6 or a G?" while looking at one of these, you know what I

mean.)

Like I said, all sorts of different folks are
working on

ways to beat spam commenters (though if that isn't bad enough, there
is

also a problem with spam blogs, or splogs, which are
blogs

created specifically as link farms, to try to do the same thing as
spam

comments. This has also been a problem for Blogger/BlogSpot, which is

kind of ironic, since the spammers are trying to raise their Google

pagerank, and Google owns Blogger/BlogSpot); I've seen some instances

of it on AOL Journals/AIM Blogs, but not too many as
yet.

Thanks -- Joe