No more comments - how we lost the blogger vs. spammer fight

The main reason why this part of the Chuck Bery Collectors website is a weblog (or blog) is to open it for your responses.
Several articles here have had great input by readers, sometimes even resulting in heated discussions.
For a good research, discussions and input are essential. This is why you'll find some options to add your personal comment to an article.

Unfortunately I had to stop allowing comments to December's article on Berry's Christmas song. This entry was abused by a huge group of blog spammers. To reduce my work in reading and deleting their garbage, I had to disable the comments function. Right now comments are still open for the 140 other articles here. If you want to add a note to the Christmas song article, please send me an email and I'll post it as a comment here.

It's sad that once again spammers destructed a useful Internet function. But it's interesting to see how the bloggers vs. blog spammers fight escalates more and more.

In the beginning we had no blog spammers. So bloggers wrote articles and readers used the comments form to add their thoughts. Comments were printed right below the main article for everyone to see - and to further comment.
Spammers recognized this as a nice opportunity to post their own texts on other people's websites. Why do they do this? One reason is to display advertising for a product all over the web. Another reason is to display links to their own offers - good for two purposes: readers of the blog might click on a link, and search engines will find lots of links to the spammer's site which in turn rises their position in result lists.
So spammers wrote little programs to search for comments forms and fill those with advertising and links automatically.

Website authors found their pages spammed with advertising or unwanted links, so a counterstrike followed.

The solution was called CAPTCHA, short for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'. The idea was to automatically find out whether a comment was written by a human reader or by a machine. There are various types of CAPTCHA. All of them work with something people can easily do and machines can't. Things such as reading a simple question and answering it or recognizing shapes in a distorted image. This is why there is a graphic with my comments form which you have to understand and describe. If you can do so, you're supposed to be human and you are allowed to post a comment.

So we excluded spammers who used computers. Next for the spammers was to change to use humans. Computers looked for comments forms, then humans such as cheaply paid students were hired to fill in the form with the spammers' ads or links. Typically the comment was nice enough to read with the advertising hidden, such as here:

Doe? your blog have a ??nta?t page? I'm having problems locating it but, I'd like to shoot you an e-mail.

Where's the advertising? In the user name and user homepage fields (not shown here). And while such a comment is nice to read, we do not want to publish their ads and links on our pages.

The next solution was algorithms to select useful comments from advertising. Comments were automatically checked against certain words and phrases. If a comment was seen as advertising, it's automatically rejected.
Worked - for some time. Next the spammers learned to mis-spell the keywords so the algorithms would no longer find them. So I received comments that read like this:

I have got you bolk marked too look at neww stuff you post

At some point the algorithms were no longer useful and we had to return to manual approvement. With blogs having few comments such as this one, this is still an option. This is the reason why you cannot post a comment and immediately see it on this site. With every comment posted, first I'll receive a message from the blog software in which I need to approve or reject the comment. Worked for some time.

But even this does not work any more now. For some reason, the Christmas song article was found by spammers to be a valuable target. (I suspect is has to do with a Facebook post about it.) Within a few days I received dozens of spam comments to reject. Sorry, folks, but this is too much work for me!

Another interesting fact is that many spammers nowadays seem to use people who cannot read English at all. Outsourced to China? Have a look at comments like this:

Keep up the {superb|terrific|very good|great|good|awesome|fantastic|excellent|amazing|wonderful} works guys I've {incorporated|added|included} you guys to {|my|our|my personal|my own} blogroll.|{Howdy|Hi there|Hey there|Hi|Hello|Hey} would you mind {stating|sharing} which blog platform you're {working with|using}?

You see? This is a template from which the spammer should have selected alternatives. If he had understood what to do.

Anyway. I have removed the comments function from certain blog posts. If you want to comment on a topic which does not have a comments form beneath, send me an email to (cbguide at crlf dot de) and I'll make sure your input will be seen by other Berry collectors.