Attention Deletetheweb hostees!

Fool that I am, I’ve lost the notes I took after my last round of trying to get you to confirm if you’re collecting your deletetheweb.com mail. So, I don’t have a decent admin distribution list for us… and thus the best way I have of reaching you en masse is to post here. American readers may wish to note that this is an example of what we in the wider and older world call ‘irony.’

Anyway – I know some of you have been suffering junk comments in your blogs, and I’ve had vague requests to install the blacklist plugin thing I mentioned a while back. I wanted to pass on this link, which sets out some of the problems with current MT anti-spam measures. It’s a bit technical, but it’s worth skimming.

You’ll see why I haven’t installed MT-Blacklist yet: it’ll work in the short term, but badly, and there’s a real danger it’ll force an arms race before the blog community is up to it. As several people are pointing out, the spammers are clever, and have seen most ‘solutions’ before: the blog writers haven’t learned from usenet or email anti-spam efforts. We’re at a distinct disadvantage here, and we don’t want to force the fight.

Suggestions for what we actually do are welcome. Personally, I plan to continue manually deleting junk comments… which is fine until I get 500 of the things.

3 thoughts on “Attention Deletetheweb hostees!”

  1. It’s not been too bad for me yet – only maybe 10 total since I started blogging. So, manually deletion is fine for me for the time being as well.

  2. It’s not been much of an issue for me either. I’ve had the odd piece or two of comment spam, but nothing that requires a technical solution. I’ve only blocked a couple of ip addresses so far. The rest I’ll just try to reason with first…

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