Comment Spam Killer?

Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type, are supporting a new collaborative effort to get rid of comment spam using a “nofollow” attribute. More here and here. Download the plugin here. I've already installed it. The directions are a little vague on which directories the files are supposed to go into, but it seems to be working. If you view the source on a comments window, you'll see any links in the comments are followed by the “rel=nofollow” tag. Cool. At this point, I'll happily try just about anything (short of eliminating comments altogether) to reduce the amount of spam I get. Since I upgraded MT-blacklist and installed the MT-DSBL plugin, the spam seems to have decreased dramatically, but some still gets through occasionally. Unfortunately, the side effect has been that at least one person who wanted to comment wasn't able to because the comment was blocked by Blacklist or the DSBL filter. It would be great if comment spammers lost their incentive to spam so I could remove those filters and thereby avoid that problem. Is this “nofollow” thing the silver bullet we've all been hoping for? Maybe I won't have to implement s-code after all. UPDATE: For the record, I just checked yesterday's logs and on the last day before I implemented the “nofollow” plugin, this MT install received 3,827 hits to its comment script. I assume that number will drop if the “nofollow” thing actually discourages comment spammers. We'll see.

Posted January 19, 2005 06:34 AM | meta-blogging