This post is umop apisdn
ubernostrum writes on Kuro5hin on the HTML LINK element attribute "nofollow", which when applied to all links posted in comments would have the effect of preventing search engines from evaluating links in comments when calculating Google PageRank.
Very few little of the comment spam that targets wampum targets articles near the present. Most of the ad insertions are four weeks or more behind the present. Some origininate from a single write-side address, most from a distributed set of addresses, and the writers show little overlap as they execute an insertion campaign on the target, http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/00nnnn.html. There have been what I think of as dysfunctional insertion campaigns. One inserted hundreds of same-spams over a set of half a dozen values of nnnn. However, there is no (significant) comment spam that is intended to be seen by a wampum reader, other than those few who arive by way of a search engine, which is 1/10th or less of the regular Summer readers (our low point of the year).
Now wampum currently enjoys high ranking in the Technorati metric. Wicked high actually, it makes my nose bleed even to think about it (or the irony that so little of wampum's linkers and commenters ever read wampum, imagine MY reading ROT ... OTK. I'm laughing, I hope you are too), and as we ran up the rankings the pattern of comment spam changed too. However, Grace also has a blog, and aside from her 2nd grade teacher, it doesn't get a lot of reading outside of MB, Sam, Jonah and Kezzie (it has pictures). But it has the same pattern of comment spam.
So ranking isn't controlling. Jude the Famous and Jude the Obscure are both equally celebrated by the write-side insertion engines. ubernostrum seems to think that high-ranked pages generate high-value inserts. I see inserts that are mostly rank-indifferent.
Read it and think about it.
Comments
of course, cheap method => spam, whether in email or comments. why isn't 6apart et al just adopting pattern recognition thingies (you know the ones that ask you what the characters in the fuzzy graphic says...)
Posted by: Peatey | January 19, 2005 08:23 PM
Hey, I read the Return Of The One True King. I have learned a whole lot about Iranian politics from the series.
Posted by: dwight Meredith | January 19, 2005 08:33 PM
it took me a couple minutes but I figured out what umop apisdn means. Pretty neat.
The trouble is, it's REALLY easy for me to just assume that any word I don't understand on this blog is either military lingo or Abenaki.
Trying to skim the surface at high speeds often leads to skipping...
Posted by: Peatey | January 19, 2005 08:34 PM
>>it took me a couple minutes but I figured out what umop apisdn means. Pretty neat.
Posted by: Diana | January 19, 2005 10:04 PM
I'll let the author of the post explain it himself.
Posted by: Peatey | January 19, 2005 11:23 PM
Peaty,
I have no idea what 6apart is doing. I could write at excruciating length after two years on the Internet Research Task Force Anti Spam Research Group and NANOG why content and extrinsics such as header and domain (ASRG) are frail reeds, and blacklists (NANOG) are as well. But who would read that?
Dwight,
I'm touched. I wish the Texans would invade ... Mars and leave me to write about Iran, not War. Can't stand the subject.
Peaty,
Being dyslexic, when I skim I laugh a lot. I read things like "Delay Executed" or some howler, missing the prepositions that make the lede a lot less fun.
Diana,
Stand on your head. (Take off shoes first)
Posted by: Eric | January 19, 2005 11:30 PM
Eric,
is IP(v6) per box [less anonymous internet] the answer? or like HIV, is the answer just slowing the transmission rate [such as requiring optical pattern recognition], so that spam just becomes nuisance to most? I can't imagine whitlist/blacklist would ever be a practical solution for most.
have i missed your previous posts on this topic?
Posted by: Peatey | January 20, 2005 01:50 AM
Peatey, there are plugins for 6apart's Moveable Type and other blog engines that do require those optical recognition thingies (usually called "CAPTCHA"s). The most obvious counterargument for them is that they make it harder for visually impaired readers to comment, though it has also been advanced that some advanced comment spammers have automated getting past CAPTCHAs by farming them out... (I ended up installing one on my own blog, but as it's mostly a photoblog I feel a little less guilty about the accessibility argument.)
Anyways, I think rel=nofollow has some promise as yet another tool in the toolbox, along with whitelists/blacklists, throttling comment rates, CAPTCHAs, and just closing comments for old posts.
(It would also be great if Windows PCs were less susceptible to being taken over and used as unwitting zombie attackers...)
Posted by: ArC | January 20, 2005 05:25 AM
>>Diana,
Stand on your head. (Take off shoes first)
Posted by: Diana | January 20, 2005 09:13 AM