Comment Spam @ WordPress

Comment & Blog Spam is an annoying aspect that tries to exploit Search Engines to improve rankings.  Driving more traffic to the spammers website to generate more revinue – either directly through PPC ads – or indirectly by driving up the value of the domain name.

It’s not just Blogs that are suffering – wiki pollution is a growing problem with poorly secured or badly implemented Wikis.  SpamHuntress wrote recently about a massive wiki spam issue on one of the sites she manages.  It’s a tough nut to crack – there isn’t a clear definition or deliniation of responsabilities on who is responsible for what.  Is it the responsibility of the site owner to make sure their site is secure?  Some would say so… but when you try to operate a large community effort (such as managing or maintaining a wiki where you want to promote community participation) implementing extras controls (such as user authentication & validation) dissuade people from participating.

SpamHuntress has a policy of contacting the network manager of the domain the spammers direct traffic to – which is a good policy – but is it their responsibility to do something about it?

I can’t help thinking that the true responibility should come back to Arpa and DNS – and their should be some tie in with the DNS environment.

The specific problems with managing spam for users of WordPress.com are exacerbated by the comment management interface – which don’t allow grouping of messages based on the senders email, IP address or the senders web-address.  Instead you have an endless list to step through when trying to pick out a comment or trackback.

It would be helpful in weeding out the good from the bad if you could select from a list of grouping options.