A Victim of Comment Spam
by Blight Crusader
This is a different kind of post for me, so I ask you to bear with me for a day here. Because I read something recently which showed in a poignant way the frustration felt by those with small blogs or interactive web sites when they have to deal with comment spam.
It’s not a technical article, so I will only provide a small excerpt here, but the whole thing is short enough to read in a few minutes, so I encourage people to read the full post.
The author is Danny Sullivan, who has been described as one of the most important voices in the search industry. If he and his wife can be discouraged by comment spam, you can only imagine the impact on millions of aspiring blog owners.
About a year ago, my wife Lorna Harris launched a social news site for woman called Boudica. You won’t find anything there now. The site’s closed due to a link spamming attack and will probably never reopen.
Lorna wanted a place where women could share stories relating to women but without a predominance of “mommy” content she’d found in some other places. Not finding what she wanted, she dived into creating Boudica.
She assembled the site entirely on her own, finding a programmer, working to develop the features and watching over the small community that made use of it.
Most of her time was spent dealing with the inevitable spam attacks that a community site faces. While her site had some defenses, this latest attack was too much. Someone decided the world needed another 500+ links about discount prescription drugs.
The whole sad story is worth reading. Being in the security industry, sometimes we see the problem too much from the technical end, and not the human end.
