Tuesday, February 01, 2005

Via Jay is an interview with a link spammer - you know, blogdom’s pestering comment spammers. Here’s the part that raised my blood pressure:

Will the initiative by Google, Yahoo and MSN, to honour “don’t follow” links defeat Sam and his ilk? “I don’t think it’ll have much effect in the short, medium or long term. The search engines caused the problem” - we didn’t quite follow this bit of logic, but Sam continued - “and they’re doing this to placate the community. It won’t work because most blogs and forms are set up with the best intentions, but when people find hard graft has to go into it they’re left to rot. To use this, they’ll all have to be updated. The majority won’t be. And there’ll just be trackback spamming.”

ARGH!

The good news?

“The hardest form to spam is that which requires manual authentication such as captchas. Or those where you have to reply to an email, click on a link in it; though that can be automated too. Those where you have to register and click on links, they’re hard as well. And if you change the folder names where things usually reside, that’s a challenge, because you just gather lists of installations’ folder names.”