Some ideas....

Posted Jul 30, 2010 2:10 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
In reply to: Some ideas.... by jmorris42
Parent article: On comment spam

What a spammer looks for is eyes on their stuff. Posting in old threads, which few people see, is a waste of time for them.

to post comments

Old threads

Posted Jul 30, 2010 13:24 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (7 responses)

Actually, spammers are quite happy to throw their crap into old threads. Much of the time, it seems that being seen by Google is all they actually care about.

Old threads

Posted Jul 30, 2010 13:45 UTC (Fri) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link]

Is this part of why you limited email notifications to a month, max?

Old threads

Posted Jul 30, 2010 14:43 UTC (Fri) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (4 responses)

Have you considered simply hiding comments from Google indexing then?
That's not realistic?

Old threads

Posted Jul 30, 2010 15:07 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

I guess that never really crossed our minds. Comments are content too, and some of them are very much worthwhile. I'd prefer not to hide them from the net.

That said, we do put rel=nofollow onto links in comments in some situations.

LWN quiz?

Posted Jul 30, 2010 16:56 UTC (Fri) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

How about just making new non-subscriber comment posters answer a few basic questions?

When would you run the "make oldconfig" command?

If a manufacturer installs Linux on mobile phones and sells them, which of the following actions does the GNU GPL require?

Which of these is _not_ a Linux filesystem?

Old threads

Posted Aug 3, 2010 23:48 UTC (Tue) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link] (1 responses)

> That said, we do put rel=nofollow onto links in comments in some situations.

what we do on the grsec forums is that for 'new' users (registered for less than X days and/or posted less than Y times) we disable the rendering of the url tag (i.e., the url is rendered as plain text, and not lost). this doesn't prevent spamming but is an annoyance for those semi-automated drive-by spammers who want to lure readers to their own sites with a click of a button. and for targeted spams it's hand-to-hand combat as usual ;).

Old threads

Posted Aug 5, 2010 11:19 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

I was going to suggest something like that. Actually I was thinking more like banning new users posts with URLs, but close. :)

Obviously, virtually every spam message contains a URL. Most legitimate comments do not.

Preventing those with fewer than 5 legit comments from posting messages with URLs seems like a small price to pay.

Old threads

Posted Jul 30, 2010 16:45 UTC (Fri) by james (guest, #1325) [Link]

It would be quite in character for spammers to send out millions of spams, each containing little more than a generic tease (hard for spam filters to filter) and a link to a LWN comment.

Regular LWN readers would not be the target of the spam, except that the spammers might hope LWN-reading sysadmins would be less likely to block lwn.net and more likely to unblock it, thinking that a LWN block was a mistake by the filtering software...