Matt Haughey says Blogspot is hurting America, which is silly but he probably knows that. It’s just too easy to automate the creation of Blogspot blogs. I would estimate about 4/5ths of the spam pings we get at Ping-O-Matic are Blogspot blogs, which makes them harder to filter en masse because we have thousands of legitimate Blogspot users too. Hat tip: Mark.
I don’t think a CAPTCHA requirement for Blogspot blog creation is too much to ask.
At least as a tempory measure anyhow, until some form of anti-bot checks are put in place.
Captcha’s aren’t a good solution long term tho – they are a pain and ugly (unless you have a nice audio file for partially sighted/blind people that is generated automatically – I’ve seen that before, its nice).
its a 5minute fix too.
A very high percentage of the spam blogs that we process at PubSub.com also come from blogspot. We’ve got more serious “problems” in Japan and China, however, for the English language, blogspot is pretty much “spamspot.” It is, as always, disappointing to see people abuse a good and free service like that offered by Google/Blogspot in such a way.
bob wyman
Aye. Believe me, when you have a community of users who feel passionately about keeping the ‘crap’ out of the Blogshares index, the #1 source of blogs to get the delisting treatment are from… Blogspot.
I agree, CAPTCHA checks upon signup would be a nice temporary fix, as for a version capable of producing an audio version of the code – I’ll be tracking that sucker down!
Rob Beckett, Santa Cruz Tech / Blogshares.com
I posted an update on Blogspot spam here:
http://www.geektronica.com/2005-06-30-the-strange-world-of-blogspot-spam-blogs
which BoingBoing just picked up (woo).
The spammers are getting smarter, and Blogspot’s not doing anything. They need a per-post CAPTCHA; the signup test isn’t enough.