Spam in blog comments has become a problem
in the blogosphere lately. Bloggers have been busy manually deleting entries, blocking IP addresses and some people have come up with comment spam filters that use keywords and such in a similar way as spam filters do.
Now here’s a thought: Comments are sent using forms on web pages and these pages are controlled by the blog owners – right? This means it is radically different from email spam, where the sender’s only connection to the recipient is knowing (or guessing) his or her email address.
I believe a solution to the problem would be to require the sender to do something “uniquely human”, similar to the image identification methods used by many free email services to fight of robot registrations.
As an example, a comment page could ask the commenter to “Click the image of the duck, the dog and the diamond to post your comment” and then display a selection of, say 9 pictures to choose from. These would again be selected randomly from a huge set of such pictures. If he or she gets the sequence right, the comment is posted, but fail to match the sequence in, say, 3 tries, and your comments are blocked. This is almost no additional hassle for the commenter, but is a task that – if the system is decently implemented – would be very hard for a spam program to get correctly.