omment Spam Prevention Techniques
Who and How in Comment Spam
Before talking about how we can prevent comment spam , we should define what is the target and how it is done.
The who or what is any web application that allows free comment for visitors and/or accepts hyperlinks submitted by users, for example - blogs, forums, wiki, guestbooks and social platform.
Regarding the how, one should know that most of comments spam is done by robots that post thousands of random comments and commercial ads combined with hyperlinks.
Why?
Spammers aim at achieve a higher rank for their site as well as relevant traffic. Google algorithm evaluates websites statistically by putting them in a higher or lower page rank, according to the amount and quality of their backlinks.
How to prevent comment spam?
Captcha – An example of validation technique
One way is to use technique of validation. Captcha is a test (mostly a distorted text with an image to be deciphered by the user) given to a user before submitting his comment. It verifies the user as a real human being, not a robot spammer.
Yet Captchas are not undefeated as there are weak Captchas that might be cracked by bots.
User Authentification
An alternative for comment spam prevention is “user authentication”. User is asked to set up a username and a password before he is allowed to comment on the site.
Links with no Power
Websites can combat comment spam by disallowing links in posts. A tag Rel=”nofollow” is attributed on the spammer’s comment and Google ignores the link from being pageranked – so basically the goal of achieving higher rank is denied.
Spammers Identification (Project Honey Pot)
Lately a new project named “Project Honey Pot” has started to track comment spam. Thousands of traps are installed all over the net watching what comment spamming is being posted by robots to blogs and forms. The collected data is available for all countries to block comment spammers.
Spam tracking Plugin
Akismet is another solution. It is a plugin that trackbacks all kinds of blogs and forums. If the comment is already known as spam – it’s never published.
What about the future?
No doubt that in the future comment spam prevention techniques will get more sophisticated just as well as new ones will be developed. This is due to the fact that achieving absolute defeat of comment spam is not only an ongoing mission but quite not an easy one also…
