Spings Attack Shmula
Update: After I posted this, I was Spinged 22 more times. That brings the total to 52 Spings in 3 hour period. I need to look at implementing captcha for my comments.
More Update: I installed Akismet and I added a math question for comments to prevent bots from comment spamming me — and, I am no longer getting any comment spam at all. Good stuff!
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Shmula was attacked by 30 Spings today. I’ve previously wrote about Splogs and Spings here, here, and the splog bait is here. Splogs and Spings put an undue burden on the blogosphere by eating up resources that should be used for genuine blogs and genuine comments. Moreover, Splogs really jeopardizes the advertising model of the internet, especially contextual ads like adsense, chitika, and others.
The difficulty, that I’ve talked about before, is accurately distinguishing something that was written by a human versus something that was written by a bot. There are great, novel approaches that I’ve talked about in my previous posts on Splogs. The neural net approach, where we train a system to learn based on a training set of authentic Blogs and a set of genuine Splogs, then making future decisions based on what was learned seems like a good approach. But, we’re playing with Turing here — I’m not bullish on neural net approaches becaue I learned first-hand from my Master’s Thesis that strong AI, as Searle calls it, just doesn’t work. I love Yahoo’s human-aided approach to the web — theirs is a strategy that I believe will work in the long run.
There are characteristics of Splogs that are not found in authentic Blogs. There’s more to come also, as research gets better in this area. For now, it’s mostly a manual deal. My friend, Greg, the founder of Findory tells me that when Blogs are submitted to Findory for indexing, he says they cull through the submissions manually. That’s too bad. We’ve got to get better in this area.
I was Spinged 30 times and from the same domain:
http://cms.po-hosting.com/
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Comments
[...] For this blog, for example, I use a mathematics CAPTCHA that is simple for humans to compute, but fools robots. CAPTCHA’s for blogs typically are used to prevent comment spam from robots. I implemented a simple mathematics CAPTCHA after being attacked by a ton of comment spam a few weeks ago. [...]
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OMg! thats a LOT of spam. the person who did that was just so sick and desperate. i got spams too but not that loads. i would be sooo pissed.