Initial measures to manage trackback spam in KNotes blogs

06-September-2005

[ dev/knotes , dev/knotes/anti-spam , social software , kind=progress report ]
I had hoped we could put this one off until an initial public release of KNotes, but recent experience tells us that we cannot recommend installing KNotes into high-page-rank Plone sites until we've put some measures in place for managing trackback spam. this post outlines the issue and roughly documents the measures we're working on.

The only definition I ever found that created the lighbulb moment I was feeling was “Social software is stuff that gets spammed.” Not a perfect definition, but servicable in its way.

Many-to-Many: Tags run amok!

I hate spammers and dirty, venal link-farming vandals. I really, really hate them.

But they are out there, and they have noticed how useful trackback 2-way linking has been in raising the google page ranking of well-connected weblogs.

The link-farming spammers may also have noticed that the boost to the page ranks of well connected weblogs has, through the development of blogging, been a good thing for seekers after good content and for google: it helped people to find what they were looking for by googling it, and it helped them to browse around communities of discourse in fascinating and useful ways. They may have noticed this, but it has not stopped them from adding noise, aggravation and ugliness to the system by perpetrating trackback-spam.

In this post, I briefly explain trackback spam, and outline the measures we are planning to help the managers of KNotes content to resist the spammers by keeping spam links out of their own content. Click the permalink ("Continue reading this item") for more...


Mike Malloch; 06-September-2005 07:28:21 forum (0)