
Stopping blog spam or Why I started to block Internet Explorer 6 - raganwald
http://vale.homelinux.net/wordpress/2008/07/20/stopping-blog-spam-or-why-i-started-to-block-internet-explorer-6/
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BrandonM
I think a lot of commenters are missing an important point of the article. The
whole thing was the scientific process in a nutshell: he made an observation
(most blog spam is ie6), made a couple hypotheses (most ie6 traffic is bots,
blocking ie6 will significantly reduce spam), tested them out, and shared the
results. He was even able to make a different, related conclusion (numbers for
windows and ie6 browsing are inflated) based on his work.

Overall, I found the piece quite interesting. I think you will, too, if you
read it not as a piece of advice but as a nicely-performed experiment.

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kenver
I think this is probably an example of using a hammer to crack a very annoying
nut. If his usual users are all linux types anyway I suppose it probably isn't
hurting much.

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gscott
Block x% of your visitors while the spammers just change there user_agent that
is passed.

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sh1mmer
Users Vs. You

Users win.

This is a horrible idea. The point of systems like Akismet, etc is to avoid
doing horrible solutions like this which penalise users. His apology to IE6
users obviously means nothing to them, _because they can't read it_!

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eru
They see their own apology.

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josefresco
Good article, but the final % he uses for bot traffic is only an educated
guess.

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devilsenigma
I'm using FF 3 and can't see this page. So much for user-agent sniffing.

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Oompa
I have no problems, and I'm using Firefox 3.

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flashgordon
umm why is it blocking firefox 3.0 on linux??

