Raoul Pop

Lately, I’ve been getting more and more comment spam on my sites – here at ComeAcross, at Dignoscentia, and at my personal site as well. I’ve come to appreciate the value of having a system like Akismet that works so well together with WordPress. Gosh, I love Akismet! It’s been a lifesaver for me. It’s caught literally hundreds and hundreds of worthless crap comments left by spam bots. Not one of these spam comments made it to the live site!

Unfortunately, this recent wave of comment spam has also brought out the glaring shortcomings in the other content management system I use, Loudblog. It has no spam filter, and spam bots have had a field day with the ComeAcross Podcast and the Dignoscentia podcasts as well. It’s nothing that can’t be remedied, of course. I can delete any comments I want, of course, albeit I have to do it manually, one by one. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to disable the ability to leave comments for the podcasts. [Edited on 8/18/06] Since I’ve written this, Loudblog has implemented comment spam features. Thanks again, Gerritt!

But this points to the bigger problem of comment spam. It’s growing! More of it pops up every day, not only on my sites, but on other sites as well. It’s awful and disgusting. For example, Engadget has recently had to disable all comments on their site while they worked on a way to reduce comment spam. This is serious! To think, there are asses out there who think of nothing better to do that to leave their marks (like graffiti) on good sites! They program spam bots to do their dirty work for them, and they practically inundate sites with their useless links! It’s the epitome of rudeness! Come to think of it, it’s worse than email spam. With email, I’d get at most one or two spam emails a day from the same spammer, but on my sites, I get tens, if not hundreds of spam comments from the same IP address. I honestly wish these ninnies would be publicly whipped or caned for their deeds.

A site is public property, because it’s a piece of real estate, like a hotel or a bar, that can be visited by people from all over the world. A private email inbox is a different matter. Spam in an inbox affects only one person, and can be quickly dispatched. Spam on a website can be seen by all of the site visitors, and can quickly clog up a site’s normal functioning, interfering with the flow and dissemination of legitimate information. In that sense, comment spam is nothing short of vandalism of one’s property, and should be punished as such. If someone left ads for crap sites on the side of your house, wouldn’t you get mad? In Singapore, people are caned for vandalism. I’m not saying we should do the same in the United States (although it would put a new spin on things), but I think we should institute laws against comment spam, and make it a punishable offense, either with time in jail or with serious fines. After all, it’s really easy to find out who’s doing it. Their IP Address is recorded with each spam comment, and IP Addresses can be traced back to a specific computer. Let’s start fighting back! Enough is enough.