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August 01, 2004

The LAST people you'd expect to be clueless about the internet

Kasia mentions weblog comment spam and how the new technique is to link not so much to one's own spam-promoting website, but to point to other weblog comments containing them. She pointed to a few guilty parties (which she found from her own weblogs), but one of them really struck me as odd.

The The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University is chock-full of serious luminaries, but for people who are so bright and internet-aware, they are shockingly clueless about how to run a weblog properly. Of the weblogs hosted on that server, 99.25% of the more than 9000 comments are spam, and the breakdown is shown here:


Who Started Oldest Spam Entries Comments Non-spam %spam
Stefan Bechtold 9/10/2003 2/15/2004 33 4950 12 99.76%
Lauren Gelman 10/03/2003 1/24/2004 23 698 6 99.14%
Elizabeth Rader 10/06/2003 1/24/2004 79 1302 20 98.46%
Chris Sprigman 5/11/2004 7/03/2004 9 90 2 97.78%
Dan Wielsch 10/09/2003 2/03/2004 9 415 1 99.76%
Anupam Chander 4/09/2004 7/10/2004 80 28 11 60.71%
Traceroutes (student blog) 11/20/2003 2/04/2004 70 1516 13 99.14%
Mark Cooper 10/30/2003 1/24/2004 2 75 2 97.33%
Christoph Engemann
 4/11/2004
 7/15/2004
 11
 29
 1
 96.55%

Note: Lawrence Lessig's weblog appears to be hosted elsewhere, so his wasn't included in these totals, but a spot check suggests that he's doing a pretty good job.

The reason for including the "Oldest spam" date is to identify those webloggers who are generally deleting spam but might be running a bit behind. For instance, it seems clear that Anupam Chander regularly deletes his trash, but he just hasn't done so lately. These people are busy with bigger issues than their own weblogs, and one is allowed to take a vacation from it now and then.

But others, such as Stefan Bechtold, even go so far as to admit that it's a problem but do nothing about it.

If the only effect of this were to make the weblog in question useless and cluttered, it would be a matter for the log's owner: s/he can decide on a cost-benefit tradeoff for any aspect of life, but this behavior actually hurts everybody by encouraging comment spam and search engine hijacking.

I believe this is simply irresponsible, and it just boggles that a group so keyed into Internet and Society could let this go on. Does "Internet and Society" only matter if you're being quoted somewhere important?

There are all kinds of ways to deal with this, but "finding a student volunteer to clean out bogus comments" or "seeking an experienced weblog admin to help you get anti-spam measures installed" seem like good places to start. At the very least, disable comments until the weblog can be run responsibly.

Of all people...

Posted by steve at August 1, 2004 12:52 PM

Comments

Yikes! Thank you for pointing this out. We are working to fix the problem ASAP.

Posted by: Lauren Gelman at August 2, 2004 04:11 PM

Fixed. Comments are disabled.

Posted by: Joe Gratz at August 2, 2004 06:36 PM

I found that just adding "mt-close" and setting it to shut off comments after 10 days was enough to stop all spam comments on my blog.

Posted by: Wendy at August 3, 2004 09:09 PM

Went through this myself. At one point I had over 26K comments on my blog after a year or so of neglect. After installing MT-Blacklist, I've gotten down to 1200 comments, of which probably 900 are spam. It's taking a lot of by hand discovery to get rid of these last few hundred.

I thought about using mt-close, but I see a lot of legit traffic coming into old posts, and I'd prefer to just deal withthe spam instead of chut things down.

Posted by: Dan Isaacs at August 6, 2004 10:06 AM