SPAM Clogs the Tubes [Akismet Stats]
There’s a lot of controversy going on all over the Internet and the real world over the massive use of peer-to-peer technology (P2P), and it’s legitimate and illegitimate implications. Namely, the massive amount of bandwidth P2P communications consume. Frankly, I believe the ISPs are blaming P2P users for using the available bandwidth on the network (regardless of the fact that those users have paid for a certain level of service) and threatening to charge for overages on ridiculously low monthly bandwidth caps instead of upgrading their networks as they should be doing just as any other company would have to who needs to keep up with demand in order to remain a viable competitor!
I’m sorry, I digress. That discussion is a whole ‘nother week of blog postings dedicated to the topic.
However, my topic today is related. Akismet (a WordPress bloggers best friend against SPAM) keeps detailed stats on the comments it filters. Every comment that is submitted to a blog with Akismet installed gets passed through Akismet and is checked to see if it looks like SPAM. If it passes the test, the comment is allowed to post on the blog. If for some reason a comment is caught that isn’t SPAM or a comment it let through that is SPAM, I can mark it manually, and Akismet will “learn” from its mistake.
Anyway, back to the stats. Listed here, you can see a basic graph outlining the number of HAM comments (legitimate comments) in blue, and the number of SPAM comments in orange. That is a outrageous HAM to SPAM ratio! And that’s only on blogs that Akismet tracks!
My point is… there’s A LOT OF SPAM. I’m sure the bandwidth it takes to transmit all that crap is fairly substantial. There have been studies that try to pinpoint the number, but they all differ. They do, however, agree that it is certainly more taxing than legitimate communications.
The solution? These ISPs should spend more of their resources locking down something that NOBODY likes (SPAM) and less time alienating their customers over crap like DNS-based behavioral tracking and bandwidth caps.
P.S. Akismet is the reason you don’t have sign-up or enter in some CAPTCHA or other human-verification code in order to comment here! So yeah! Give it up for Akismet!
Splogs Suck
This site has only been up for about a week and already a splog, or spam blog, had gotten a hold of it.
Splogs are “fake” blogs whose content is usually entirely stolen from legitimate blogs. In this case, I wrote a post last week that cited Wikipedia and contained a tag for Wikipedia. I believe this is how the splog in question ripped off my content. Splogs I’ve had experience with will re-post information from any blog that shows up in a Technorati or Google Blog Search feed with a particular tag or keyword.
The splog will attempt to get my content indexed in search engines to generate traffic to the splog’s site which is usually inundated with paid advertising links (read: pr0n).
Often, too, the splog will send a pingback to the original blog. Pingbacks (also known as trackbacks) are used to notify a blog that another blog has cited information from a particular post. The pingback will appear as a snippet of the new post in the comments section of the cited post. This a great feature because it allows easy link trading between bloggers with similar interests, and it gives credit to the original author.
The problem with splogs sending pingbacks are now the sucker gets a link in my comments to his/her rip-off of my post. Fortunately, Akismet is catching on to these and will file it as spam before it hits my blog.
There’s nothing I can do about the bastard stealing my content (except to change the content, or play the sucker), really, but the silver lining in spam blog is that I know my site is being searched and indexed!
Splog in question: http://wikipedia.doorwayblogging.info/ (NSFW)
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