Google Reacts to Splogs 170
labnol writes "Recently, Mark Cuban of Icerocket made the accusation that Blogger is by far the worst offender when it comes to Spam Blogs. Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam and another feature called Flag As Objectionable where users can report blogs with questionable content. Google appears to be listening."
Re:good for google (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Does anybody really care... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:good for google (Score:3, Informative)
Oh yeah (Score:5, Informative)
If you use the 'next blog' randomizing feature on blogs you'll see that roughly one out of five 'blogs' are nothing but link farms, worm repositories and bullshit like that.
And this has been going on for quite a while. We all know that Google has a fondness for indexing Blogger content rather quickly, and so do the spammers. It's about time the company did something about it.
Re:I can see it now.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Firefox kept asking me if I wanted to "launch the application".
Re:good for google (Score:3, Informative)
Sheesh, I know it's de rigeur here to not read the article, but at least read the freakin' summary.
Now Google Blogger is introducing Word Verification for user comments to prevent comment spam
What part of that don't you understand?
And I say it's about time too. I have a (very unpopular, sporadically updated) blog on Blogger/Blogspot - linked above - and every single time I post an update I get at least 3 or 4 nearly instantenous spam comments. I have to check the next day and go through and delete them manually as it is now.
Of course, the really annoying thing is these are the only comments I ever get! But I guess that's to be expected with a blog that's updated approximately once every three months...
W3C: Inaccessibility of Visual Anti-Robot Tests (Score:3, Informative)
I can't really see a good reason to why Google has that new word verification feature off by default
Probably something to do with laws requiring companies to make their products accessible to people whose disabilities prevent them from seeing images. (Read More... [w3.org]) Turning on accessibility (that is, turning off word verification) by default means that liability for inaccessible blogs lies with the blog administrator, not with Google.
Re:Wikipedia article. MODS - it links to Penis (Score:1, Informative)
Splog
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Spam blogs, or splogs, are blog sites in which the author posts only spam messages.
Splogs have recently become a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's Blogger service. These sites waste valuable disk space and bandwidth, only to display a bunch of links - often to disreputable or otherwise useless Web sites.
Now, the link in saskboys sig goes to a ebay page with this:
Many male humans silently wish they had a larger sexual organ. The anxiety they feel about their genital length is completely unnecessary, now that PEMS(TM) is available.
Exactly who is full of shit is now left as an execise for the reader.
Blogger Addresses Flag Abuse Issue (Score:3, Informative)
So for those who are concerned that their "enemies" might use the "Flag" feature to attack their blogs, relax!
Re:I can see it now.. (Score:3, Informative)
No. It won't
Blog spam will never die [diveintomark.org]