p2pnet comment spam: more
p2pnet.net News:- Spam – email garbage – costs billions of dollars and wastes countless labour hours. Entire countries allocate vast sums and staff to deal with it, as do corporate and non-corporat entities.
It’s not quite as evil as the poxes such as the RIAA, CRIA, BPI, and so on, inflicted by the Big Four Organized Music labels, EMI, Vivendi Universal, Warner Music, and Sony BMG, or Hollywood’s MPAA, on their own customers.
The Big Four and the MPAA, owned by Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, routinely use these so-called ‘trade’ units to ruin the lives of thousands of men, women and even young children around the world in their ceaseless efforts to sue them into buying grossly over-priced ‘product’.
But spam is BAD and p2pnet has had, and is still having, its share, with special reference to the infestations spread under Readers’ Writes by automatic mass-mail bots.
It’s difficult to imagine how anyone would be dumb enough to take any spam seriously, but people obviously do and the onslaughts continue.
Comment spam is, however, somewhat different. As I posted here, much (most?) of it seems to come from China, “and apart from sucking up resources, the spam, much of it disgusting porn, including kiddie porn, is picked up during Google and other searches, which lead straight back to p2pnet. And clearly, that’s not good from any perspective.”
It’s a serious pain and even though the new verification process is cutting it down drastically, there’s still a huge amount lurking under posts and I spend about half-an-hour every day finding and deleteting it – time I, as a one-man band, don’t have.
We’re trying to implement some of the suggestions, ie, losing the letter O and the number zero, and other number/letter combinations that can be too easily confused, and using different fonts.
Someone also suggested that arranging things so only non-registered readers would need to verify. Great idea but unfortunately, it wouldn’t make any difference.
Meanwhile, p2pnet’s newest scribe, Monty Icenogle in California, has a few thoughts on verification. Here’s what he wrote.
I’m a totally blind computer user who uses text to speech software, often called a screen reader, to access and use my computer.
Though 99 percent of p2pnet readers will be able to see the graphical verification image showing the characters they need to input in order to post a comment, blind computer users such as myself who use text to speech software cannot see this image, so by forcing users to input characters shown in a graphical image, blind users such as myself are excluded from the comment posting process!
I propose that users wanting to post comments that are blind and therefore are unable to see the image, be allowed to post comments in one of two ways:
First, I’d be happy to sign up to the site to allow my comments to be posted and seen by site visitors. This process is fully accessible to a blind computer user using a screen reader.
A second option may be to provide the system with an email address where it would send a “did you really send this comment?” type of message. Only after the user responds to this email would the comment be accepted for posting to the site.
As it stands now, users that cannot see the image cannot post comments any more, and I hope my suggestions will somehow result in users in this situation being able to eventually post comments again.
September 4th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Used at sites like LiveJournal.
September 4th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
Couldn’t you use a system where you ask for the answer to a simple maths question to verify that people are not spammers?
You ask e.g. “What is one + one?” and people would put a ‘2′ in a box thus verifying that they are living and not spambots.
I think this would also work with screenreaders.
September 5th, 2006 at 1:39 am
Get out the Kittie and Audio CAPTCHA
KittieCaptcha FTW!
Also, make it so registered users who post about 20 posts with captcha’s without any complaints can then no longer need to do the verification.
This seems to work very well for digg.
I have to open nano and type my message in there now because I always manage to get the damn thing incorrect and lose my post. Then all I gotta do is paste it outta the text editor.
September 5th, 2006 at 4:07 pm
Since the spam is comming from China, why not just block comment postings from China for awhile and see what happens.
September 5th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
It has been a continuous annoyance to me that while the government(U.S.) has been EXTREMELY aggressive in passing anti-file sharing and pro DRM laws, it has done next to nothing when it comes to spam. Unlike file sharing, which primarily effects movie, music, and software companies, spam affects everyone negatively. I read somewhere that spam costs companies an enormous amount of money in time spent dealing with it. ISP’s are bitching about bittorrent, I would guess spam uses as much or more band width, and unlike bittorrent, where someone is dl’ing something they want, is unwelcome. I know it will never happen, but I would love to see the government go after spammers with the same aggression it has shown toward file sharers.
September 6th, 2006 at 5:47 am
You will find that our dubious friend as been back spamming last night. He is now to the point he can’t do it automatically and must do it one post at a time. Only this time, I and another reader have been marking them. All that is needed to find them is to look for the subtopic “The above is spam”.
*NOTE: 5th attempt to enter string…
September 6th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
I have been doing that for a while.
I would also think that it would help because forum searches
for the word Spam would lead mods to the spam so it can be
deleted.
I also gotta go along with Monkey’s post below.
Why the F doesn’t the gub’mnt work as hard to locate and
prosecute the REAL problem of unsolicited spam ??
( those that pay the spammers pay more in taxes ?? )
September 6th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
Thanks for the thought, but I doubt if the returns would be commensurate with the effort : )
Meanwhile, most of the Chinese stuff has gone, leaving mainly e-junk from casino companies and gambling joints.
Cheers! And 2LHZI : )
September 7th, 2006 at 1:44 am
could allow registered users to rate posts up or down like on other sites like digg/slashdot that way spam gets hidden by consensus
September 8th, 2006 at 10:53 am
I think labeling his spam right below the post has helped prevent clicks. I notice he’s not so eager to continue when they’re all marked out which ones don’t need to be clicked on. It sort of looks successful as a preventive as they are no longer hid in the pile of posts that way. No one clicks on one to open it when they are marked.
June 13th, 2008 at 12:10 am
in general comments want to post any opinion on or before registering or not….
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