Our Take on Comment Spam
When working in the spam space (dare I say spamosphere?) you have to be careful not to disclose too much about what goes on “under the hood”, as spammers are always seeking to exploit any informational edge they can. At the same time, we think it’s important to make sure our community understands what Defensio is all about, and the philosophy behind our approach.
We believe, as most of you will, that comment spam is a big problem (and getting worse). The way we see it, there are two ways to attack the issue:
1) At the source: trying to shut down the spammers altogether
2) At the destination: trying to stop spam as it attempts to hit your blog
The first option is a valuable approach, and there are many initiatives going on to try to thwart spammers directly (such as pursuing them through legal/criminal action or developing new technical specifications that would make spam impossible). This is certainly the ideal way forward, but its Achilles heel is timing and consensus. Making these wheels turn is a long, slow process - and all the while, spam will continue to pour into the blogosphere like a meaty, raging waterfall, and the techniques used will continue to evolve. And let’s not forget that actively pursuing thousands of spammers all over the world is a logistical and jurisdictional nightmare, especially when you consider the grey zone in which spammers operate in many countries without spam legislation.
At Defensio, we adopt the second option, not because it’s better, but because it’s the pragmatist’s approach. We (reluctantly) accept that the spam firehose will likely continue to be aimed at our collective heads for some time to come, and so we feel the need to develop good tools to handle the onslaught. And by better tools we mean both improving how spam is caught and how spam is managed. Some may think it defeatist, (or a “leaky condom” as one colorful critic called it) but we call it practical and effective.
So what this means is that:
- Defensio’s web service is designed to filter all incoming comments and trackbacks to your blog, banishing spam to a quarantine (using of secret-sauce of counter-spammy intelligence)
- Provide you with a convenient and hassle-free way of sorting through quarantined comments
- Learn and improve over-time, in a way that is personalized to your individual blog
Hope that sheds some light on our philosophy and some of the high-level mechanics of the Defensio platform!
Of course, you’ll have a chance to see this in action for yourself once we start rolling out accounts to our eager beta-testers (soon, we promise!).