Just checked my Thoughts and noticed that I had got very first comments for my blog entries. Curious, I clicked on the entry to read them. I had got blog spam! I thought it was hilarious. Ok, this is a boring technology blog, so maybe I could spice it up with some girl pictures. But come on, spamming other people's blogs - can you go any lower than that? Did you really think that this site will generate so massive amounts of nerd traffic to your little xxx site that it's really worth it?
While laughing at first, I started thinking. Because there are only few different blogging tools, it wouldn't be that hard to make a spam spider that would add comments to all open entries it finds and post links to whatever site you wish. How do you block blog spam? Will Movable type need to start adding spam filters to their tool? Will this become another bitter, eternal fight with spammers and users, with black lists, law suits etc? The only difference here compared to email spamming is that I know where the spam comes from. It's pretty hard to spoof your IP. Of course, spammers could start using public computer in libraries and wherever to run their evil spiders to avoid being blocked. But still. Do spammers really think this is a good way of getting more visitors to their sites?
I haven't allowed the use of html in comments and now I have a good reason why not. The only way you can post a link is to use the URL field. Maybe in the future I have to remove it, but I left it there for the time being. And yes, of course I banned the IP after checking it and deleted the comments. I'm curious to see what kind of comments I'll get for this entry.
--- EDIT:
Today, October 25th, I removed 11 blog spams and also removed the option to post anonymous comments. Sad, isn't it?