

Ask HN: Who will save us from spam comments? - brandnewlow

Was rereading Steve Levy's great piece about YC on Wired.com just now and scrolled down to read the comments:<p>http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/05/ff_ycombinator/<p>There are 17 comments on the article.  11 of them are spam comments.<p>I see this more and more on content sites.  I assume they all are using various spam filtering systems.  Yet the spammers win, again and again.<p>Is FB/Disqus the only answer?
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zoowar
Disqus is not the answer. Those "blog comments [are] powered by Disqus"

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getsat
Phished Facebook accounts can be bought in batches of thousands and are
relatively inexpensive. If Facebook's commenting system becomes prevalent,
people will just start phishing/selling accounts even more.

As long as there's a profit margin, it will be automated or outsourced.

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Houston
Spammers will always win. If it is made by the hands of a human, it is pretty
much common sense that it has aspects that can be exploited.

But, that's not to say the amount of spam can't be minimized. I can't say for
sure, but it doesn't look like Wired has /any/ sort of spam prevention
technology re: their article comment section. A tool such as Askimet
(<http://akismet.com/>) can quell the amount of spam, but it won't eliminate
it completely.

~~~
sorbus
> Spammers will always win. If it is made by the hands of a human, it is
> pretty much common sense that it has aspects that can be exploited.

They seem to be losing on HN. Mostly because we're very low-profile, but for a
while there were bunches of spam comments by new users. They all ended up dead
really quickly, and it seems to have petered out (nothing in the first two
pages of /noobcomments), though there are occasional bursts.

There are also all the spam articles (look at /noobstories), but again, most
of those end up dead instantly, and the ones which don't never go anywhere.
The fact that every link off-site has rel=nofollow probably helps - no link
juice gets given to other sites, so spamming HN doesn't improve search rank.
The hellbanning system probably helps too - if a spam account is banned, it
doesn't notice anything different, but everything it submits is autokilled.

