Almost daily, some optimistic blogger asks in BHF: How Do I? the question
There are 4 levels of authentication, permitted at the option of the blog owner.
With option #3, and since a Blogger account has no intrinsic value comparable to a FaceBook or Twitter account, were Blogger to block or delete any Blogger account for attempted spam comment publication, it would be a trivial effort for a spammer to switch to another Blogger account.
The more active and persistent spammers use many different identities, and many different IP addresses (generally through a botnet). Neither Account nor IP Address filters have any real chance of making a difference.
With comment filtering, Blogger takes the only practical strategy, and allows the blog owners to select which comments to allow, in their blogs. As to which comments are to be moderated, and when the moderation is to be conducted, that is the decision of the blog owner. The blog owner can choose to train the spam filters, which will use collaborative heuristics to detect and remove mass submitted commercial comments. Simply unwanted comments, though, are the personal business of each blog owner.
It's that simple.
(Update 2010/07/01): It's possible that Blogger is doing something about the problem of spam comments, by removing the motivation behind spam comments.
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How do I report unwanted comments?as if Blogger has a classification in the Report Abuse form for spam comments. Unfortunately, they do not.
There are 4 levels of authentication, permitted at the option of the blog owner.
- Anyone / Anonymous.
- Registered Users / OpenID.
- Users with Google accounts.
- Blog members.
With option #3, and since a Blogger account has no intrinsic value comparable to a FaceBook or Twitter account, were Blogger to block or delete any Blogger account for attempted spam comment publication, it would be a trivial effort for a spammer to switch to another Blogger account.
The more active and persistent spammers use many different identities, and many different IP addresses (generally through a botnet). Neither Account nor IP Address filters have any real chance of making a difference.
With comment filtering, Blogger takes the only practical strategy, and allows the blog owners to select which comments to allow, in their blogs. As to which comments are to be moderated, and when the moderation is to be conducted, that is the decision of the blog owner. The blog owner can choose to train the spam filters, which will use collaborative heuristics to detect and remove mass submitted commercial comments. Simply unwanted comments, though, are the personal business of each blog owner.
It's that simple.
(Update 2010/07/01): It's possible that Blogger is doing something about the problem of spam comments, by removing the motivation behind spam comments.
>> Top
Comments
Email can be traced, but only to a limit. Email forwarded generally can't be traced before where it was forwarded. Email delivered through a GMail server generally can't be traced before that, either.
The latter details is why many spammers, and some security experts, like GMail. Its use increases your physical anonymity, in a way that many web based email systems do not.
can I just thank you for this whole blog...I have learned so much from you!!! :)
If you do not want people to easily email information about your blog to their friends, removing the email icon will do that. It won't do a lot about the spam though.
And people who really want to email information about your blog will do so, using their own email client, intentionally.