I read with interest Mark Pilgrim’s highly pessimistic, but well thought out, article on comment spam yesterday. Whilst I find that I cannot disagree in principal with most things Mark says, I somehow feel that things aren’t quite at the throwing in the towel stage. On the WordPress developer list we have been discussing tactics which Mark hasn’t touched upon but which could be employed to negate the value (increased page rank) of comment spamming. Dougal sums things up nicely in the article he wrote over at the WordPress Development Blog
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How about the methods Yahoo! and other large websites use to stop automated registration? GoDaddy.com uses a similar method to prevent automated WHOIS queries. An image with a random string or number is created, and the commenter must type in that number to have their comment posted. In theory, only humans can “read” those images.
The problem with that method Elliot, is that it makes the site considerably less accessible (e.g. to people who are visually impaired but can still enjoy the site with screen readers).
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