Project Honeypot Spam fighting

vaaaska

Just came across this...sounds intriguing. I'm cuirous of if any of y'all have toyed with this and/or if you have opinions about it.

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/

My quick take, what's the point of trying to beat the spam harvesters? They probably already have every email I've ever had in their system. Is this is a viable approach?

piersk

I guess its a start. Also, even tho they may well have a list of email addresses, it doesn't hurt to help stop them getting any more

vaaaska

Any attempts to fight the spam stuff is good...but I think I'll have to wait on this one. I'm not sure if I'm ready to donate and MX record to the cause (need to wait for the blogosphere to dig up the details first so I can understand it more).

Also, a collection of search engines and blogging companies have proposed to add a new tag to links...although I feel that this is just another indicator for spam collectors to work even more furiously when they find said snippet.

Paperclips and mouse traps...somebody needs to invent something from outer space on this topic.

bubblenut

The extra href attribute (nofollow I believe) is designed to prevent (or reduce the effectiveness) of blog comment and forum spamming by site owners to increase their search engine rating rather than the harvesting of addresses for email spam. If the nofollow attribute is found in a link the searchengine bots will not follow it and will not register it as a link rendering it useless. I personally think it's a very good idea, the obvious down side to it is that blog and forum software writers will have to mod their software and (what I think will be the real inhibitor) provders will have to upgrade in order to make it effective.

piersk

See, I don't get the whole nofollow thing. I know that you can use a file called robot.txt and this will tell robots and crawlers etc where they can or can't go. However, whats to stop spam crawlers from carrying on burrowing deeper into a website??

goldbug

Originally posted by piersk
See, I don't get the whole nofollow thing. I know that you can use a file called robot.txt and this will tell robots and crawlers etc where they can or can't go. However, whats to stop spam crawlers from carrying on burrowing deeper into a website??

Economics. Say a spamming organization derives a majority of its revenue from placing links to whatever crappy products as comments in popular blogs (then people click the links, etc... same as email spam as far as sales per million)...if the popular blog sites start using the nofollow attribute, search engines that respect it--google, whoever else--will no longer index the "followed" site linked from the blog. In other words, if a comment spammer has been using comments on a popular blog to beef up their Google pagerank , adding nofollow will in effect render all their comment spams worthless--as far as search engines go. People could still click the links and buy their garbage, but their revenue that came from search engine rankings will be reduced/destroyed.

For those still wondering the point, a better explanation than mine

vaaaska

Originally posted by goldbug
Economics. Say a spamming organization derives a majority of its revenue from placing links to whatever crappy products as comments in popular blogs (then people click the links, etc... same as email spam as far as sales per million)...if the popular blog sites start using the nofollow attribute, search engines that respect it--google, whoever else--will no longer index the "followed" site linked from the blog. In other words, if a comment spammer has been using comments on a popular blog to beef up their Google pagerank , adding nofollow will in effect render all their comment spams worthless--as far as search engines go. People could still click the links and buy their garbage, but their revenue that came from search engine rankings will be reduced/destroyed.

For those still wondering the point, a better explanation than mine

Thanks, this is a good explanation of things. I'm still a little skeptical though of how this will all play out but we're still at the beginning end of all of these things...