Nofollow – No Improvement

I hate it when I’m right“, I sigh, as I clean out yet another load of online poker spam from my blog’s comments system, all of which is entirely useless to the spammer because of rel="nofollow"

12 thoughts on “Nofollow – No Improvement

  1. Here’s an idea: change the names on the form inputs. I don’t think the spammers would put in the extra effort for a few edge cases when they can just hardcode everything in.

  2. A gentleman by the name of Adam Rosi-Kessel, whose blog I regularly read, employs a Turing test in his blog comment system that he claims is very effective. All it entails is adding an extra form element to the page that says “Don’t put anything in here”, and then trashing any comments that fail to follow the instructions. Spammers and spam bots will invariably fill out every field because they think it will help them spread their message. It’s pretty clever, really.

  3. Maybe it is time to switch to an open source blogging platform. WordPress? With the free (but not open source) fantastic service Akismet.

  4. C’mon, Gerv, join us, wordpressers, Aksimet made me that I didn’t see spam for a long time :)
    If you don’t want Aksimet, you still have zillion other plugins. :)

  5. The technical ideas are all very well, but they require access to change the server-side scripts, which I don’t have.

    I’d like to move to WordPress (because it is free software), but last time I looked into it, 1.5 had just been released and there were very few skins available. Perhaps it’s time to look again.

  6. I’m not totally sure who’s blog I saw it on, but on a blog, I saw this as an anti-spam feature: 96+21 = . You had to solve a simple addition problem, and put in the right answer. Not sure if it is available for your blogging software, but if it is, give it a try.

  7. WordPress’ community has grown and matured since WordPress 1.5, as has the development team.

    Sue Gardner [1] during her Northern Voice session on Blog Design for Everyone [2] commented on the large quantity and quality of WordPress themes (skins).

    There are a number of sites dedicated to spotlighting good WordPress themes.

    http://gerv.wordpress.com/ is available ;-) Other prolific bloggers have just left their previous blogs behind. [3]

    Links:
    [1] http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com/member/1/
    [2] http://2006.northernvoice.ca/speakers/blog-design-for-everyone
    [3] http://scoble.weblogs.com/