Just Another Word
Shelley Powers: In the meantime, here’s a surefire method of preventing comment spam
WOW. Every once in a while somebody steps up and concisely states something that, in retrospect, should have been so blindingly obvious that you have to hit yourself in the head and say "why didn't I see that before".
This is one of those times.
Spammers aren't going to spend their precious time checking to see how you have implemented nofollow. Despite having implemented nofollow on the Atom wiki, spam attempts continue to increase there.
But spammers will seek out those with precious pagerank and focus their efforts there. Most spam attempts are preceded by google queries for words like add your comment and edit this page.
Duh.
So, the surefire way to eliminate comment spam is to drop out. Not just from Google, but also from Technorati tags, and no advertising by pinging weblogs.com or equivalent either.
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.
So, the question is: what's worth fighting for. For Shelley, it is comments. For Gordon, it is links. At the moment, I tend to lean towards Gordon's point of view. To be fair, Shelley provides similar support on her blog, and is experimenting with new ideas.
Meanwhile, if you are using IE 5.5 on Windows 98 and you don't provide a referer, don't bother trying to post to the Atom wiki. You are not worth fighting for.