The war on comment spam - bring out the big guns
This blog has been suffering a barrage of comment spam for a while now, like most MoveableType blogs. I use MT-Blacklist to try and control it but it's still a pain. I know that there are even more methods of trying to stem the flow (thanks for the offer of help John!) but to be honest I have been contemplating switching to Blogger. Because Blogger is owned by Google all of the links in the comments go through a page-rank stripping redirect. Consequently I've had no comment spam in my other blogs.
Now Google announce a new value for the "rel" attribute on HTML anchor tags. It goes like this...
<a href="http://a.linl.somewhere" rel="nofollow">A link that won't be followed</a>.
Everyone is on board, all the blog engines plus Google, Yahoo! and MSN. (Here's the plugin for MT). Nice. Lets hope it makes a difference.
If anyone is interested, there's other reasons for me to switch to Blogger:
- I'm allergic to Perl
- I've been using Blogger for longer than MT and have other blogs using Blogger (I could have them all in one dashboard)
- I can never figure out which category to put posts in (I want deli.cio.us style tags please!)
- Blogger has a great WYSIWYG web editor
- I could host it for free if I wanted to on Blogspot
- I'm not really utilising the power of MT
I'm not sure if that is convincing enough yet though. I could perhaps upgrade MT to 3.1 but not sure that I could face the pain it may cause.
Testing the nofollow plugin don't go here.