03:11 pm, 8 Oct 03
the dark side of anonymity
When we were discussing trying to make weblog systems interoperate, there was talk about trackback and comments working across sites. Brad, of course, refused to allow trackback/comments that wasn't authenticated. Everyone else said "oh, it's not that much of a problem... people generally sign their trackbacks/comments properly".
Well, of course they do. They did so in email, too, and now I get hundreds of spams a day. Doing it on the web is even more insidious, as recent wiki spamming indicates. This guy (calling himself a "search engine optimizer") inserts links to his site into wiki pages. Why? It inflates his Google pagerank.
It's just a matter of time before someone starts crawling the web looking for open comment/trackback forms and doing the same thing. (Also, this guy reportedly did it manually; a script would be much more effective.) What do we do then? Me, I'll just laugh at them from the safety of LiveJournal. On the Atom list, they're talking about how to combat this manually(!?) by creating notifications that let them be notified of the spam so they can revert the pages.
(Though my email situation still sucks. And if LJ ever drops invite codes, the problem returns...)
Well, of course they do. They did so in email, too, and now I get hundreds of spams a day. Doing it on the web is even more insidious, as recent wiki spamming indicates. This guy (calling himself a "search engine optimizer") inserts links to his site into wiki pages. Why? It inflates his Google pagerank.
It's just a matter of time before someone starts crawling the web looking for open comment/trackback forms and doing the same thing. (Also, this guy reportedly did it manually; a script would be much more effective.) What do we do then? Me, I'll just laugh at them from the safety of LiveJournal. On the Atom list, they're talking about how to combat this manually(!?) by creating notifications that let them be notified of the spam so they can revert the pages.
(Though my email situation still sucks. And if LJ ever drops invite codes, the problem returns...)
Super-lame.
trackback screening?
This could be a stupid question (or have already been discussed) but what about treating trackbacks as comments to an entry but forcing them (at least by default) to be screened?Re: trackback screening?
That's the plan.Trackbacks are just a type of comment.
And let users screen them if they've selected to screen anonymous users. (because trackbacks are essentially an anonymous user, since no LJ auth can take place...)
Re: trackback screening?
Does that mean LiveJournal will have trackback support soon?Re: trackback screening?
Always been the plan.Just care more about perf/arch stuff first. And need a bunch more programmers.
Wiki Spam...
Well, I guess not technically spam but I've been cleaning out the SeattleWireless wiki of people altering or adding links to Amazon.com with their referral code. I only found it because someone else came along and changed someone else's referral code to their own. So its been there for a least a little while.