Kill the sploggers
I HAVE KILLED the most pernicious comment spammers who routinely pester this blog and thanks to Typepad's blocklist, most of the trackback spammers stay away too. This is an important Typepad feature because I can set up Typepad to force all trackbacks into my mailbox for approval or I can trust Typepad to block the maggot tracks. In actual practise, I for every six trackback attempts, only one post to this blog because Typepad kills those it recognises as splogs. This is important because as Mark Cuban points out another set of maggots that have to be stopped in their tracks--the sploggers. What's a splog? Cuban explains. "A splog is a blog whose creator doesn't add any written value".
How many splogs are out there? I've blocked 210 already, among the 625 IPs that I have manually prevented from posting or linking here.
Want to get an idea of the number of splogs out there? Go search your favourite blog search engine for pills, casinos, or hair loss. Cuban says, "Anything that has ever been spammed about is spammed in monstrous proportions in the blogosphere because it's easy to do".
Fortunately for me, it's also easy to block sploggers with Typepad's controls. Those who run blog indexes could help out too by simply refusing to list sploggers in aggregated lists.
Mark Cuban -- "A splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up...and we all lose" via Doc Searls
Note to the offended: If you feel I've blocked you without cause, drop me an email and we'll see if you're using an offensive IP.
