Today’s big story is preventing comment spam with rel=”nofollow”. Color me sceptical. As I noted in fighting comment spam, I found that link moderation was an ineffective counter-measure - the spam-master just continued to bludgeon me with linkless comments. To the best of my knowledge, my comment link blacklist has been the most effective weapon in my anti-spam arsenal.

I suspect that the cost of spam is so low that the spam-masters will continue to cast a wide net - spamming promiscuously in search of unprotected targets. And that it will take years of punishing and closing down those unprotected targets before rel=”nofollow” finally ends comment spam.

20 Jan: The nofollow Silver Lining.