Yes like you said it seems cruel but on the other hand it’s understandable…

Andrea

If a comment is a vague as calling a post “nice”, “comprehensive” or any other adjective describing the way you wrote the post and not its actual content, there’s nothing to tell you otherwise if you’re already assuming that it relates to what you wrote.

If you read every comment on a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ basis, waiting to see something that proves the author read and understood your post, the success rate in rejecting splot bait ought to be higher.

Not only would this be at odds with our human tendency to be trusting, but would probably lead to genuine people’s comments being rejected and thus the spammers will have stolen yet more from us.

(okay, not helpful, I know.)

Two nights ago, Jonathan Zittrain showed how armies of low-paid workers in countries that offered no better options labor all day deciphering captchas for evil masters. Thus human components are employed in the midst of an otherwise robotic chain designed to defeat a system with a security component based on readability only by humans.

That’s why I’m the captcha. First-time comments by everybody go through moderation, which is me. If the comment looks like it came from a human without evil motives, I usually approve. Right now I have four, including the two I wrote about here, that I’ve “defered” until I make a decision at some point.

Sometimes I’ll write back to the sender and ask if they’re human. But I shouldn’t have to bother.

Anyway, go refigure.

Maybe I’m missing something, and if I am please set me straight, but isn’t captcha designed to keep that sort of splogging from occurring in the first place? Or can captcha not be implemented on your blog? Or is captcha too easily gamed as well?

I was getting all kinds of crazy splogging from Russia on a wiki I run for work (it was my first wiki). After putting in a captcha module, I stopped finding orphaned pages selling sex aids and office bazookas. Problem solved.

They’re not all harmless. If all the bots were did was game AdSense it would be bad enough, but by passing the Turing Test, some of those comments can carry malware code, or open the path for it.

Last year my daughter and I both lost blogs when malware came into Searls.com via comment spam. Something Bad got into the server, set up a spam relay in our mail server, and did other Bad Things.

I don’t know all the dangers here, though maybe my colleagues at StopBadware can chime in. But I am sure the dangers are real.