Against Monopoly
defending the right to innovate
Open Thread
Monopoly corrupts. Absolute monopoly corrupts absolutely.
Copyright Notice: We don't think much of copyright, so you can do what you want with the content on this blog. Of course we are hungry for publicity, so we would be pleased if you avoided plagiarism and gave us credit for what we have written. We encourage you not to impose copyright restrictions on your "derivative" works, but we won't try to stop you. For the legally or statist minded, you can consider yourself subject to a Creative Commons Attribution License.
Comment Spam
Following a suggestion of a commentator, and based on reading the google blog, all links in comments are now marked "nofollow". This means that while the link works as normal, it will not be counted for Google page rankings. As the comment spam is being left by human beings paid by spammers (mostly hired from Amazon Mechanical Turk apparently) we may hope that the spammers are intelligent enough not to pay for links that won't increase their page ranks and will leave us alone. I will continue to be vigilant and delete spam as it appears. Let's see if that works before introducing registration and "trusted" users.
[Posted at 12/18/2010 09:39 AM by David K. Levine on Open Thread 
comments(4)]
Comments
We've used nofollow on all links for years and still get thousands of spam comments per day. It does make their links not effective, but it hasn't stopped them.
Have you looked into using an anti-spam filter service like Akismet?
[Comment at 12/20/2010 02:42 AM by Mike Masnick]
It's still possible to linkspam simply by not putting quotes around the link. Google would still pick it up as a link that counts for pagerank because there is no space before the "rel"
[Comment at 12/21/2010 12:39 PM by Kid]
Working link, even better.
[Comment at 12/21/2010 01:30 PM by Kid]
Fixed by putting a space before the rel.
[Comment at 12/26/2010 08:30 AM by David K. Levine]
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