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Dearest Bot, do not follow this link because I do not trust the content offered at that link.

Lets ridiculize nofollow a little. I do nofollow links to Google SERPs. I do nofollow links to Wikipedia. Why? Because the content I see and trust today when I link to those pages might have become totally different in the next weeks, months.

I defend dofollow for comments. Why? Because I monitor my comments. So do you. So does 5% of the other bloggers.
All automated WP installs and scraping blogs, don’t. Millions of blogs are abandoned.
There is a need for nofollow as standard (eventho I’d love to see the possibility to opt for no nofollow in my WP settings, I see no need for a plugin).
I like SERPs clean as they are today. They have improved significantly over the last 15 months. Nofollow is one of the reasons.
Another one the duplicate content penalization.

But fact is, no matter what new rules land, criminals will always be ahead of the law. Imagine SEs and services such as Akismet were to build an internetwide blacklist service/database. Would it solve the problem?
No. Spammers would find an automated process to install new proxy services on their servers aso.

It’s a never ending battle. The more domains get registered, the more domain possibilities will be created.
The more people go online, the more IPs there will be and the more IPs can be abused by spammers.
And will be.

All we can do is monitor actively.

Jessica: Wonderful idea!

What we can do is publicize the need to DO something about this. Let’s work together with artists and writers to spread the word that this needs to stop. Make it grass roots or bigger. Somehow, somewhere, someone knows how to trace the money sources and can help us put an end to this, if we spread the word that we want comment spam (and email spam) stopped. It can be done.

Let’s see how big a difference our blogs can make when we all work together for a single cause, and I think this one is a good one that impacts everyone, no matter what they blog about, nor what language they blog in. It’s the universal evil on the web.

This is one way artists can fight back. We can take and re-mix the spam into art.

The original post I wrote can be found on the Blog Herald Lorelle.
Spamart 001 – Wanted Dead or Alive

I like shutting down comments on old posts. Infact, that is something I do on my self-hosted blogs. But, WordPress.com hasn’t provided a way to do that, or am I missing something?

Is there any way to have a catchpa for spammers that repeatedly spam? Can something be done with the information on spam that Akismet has collected (IP addresses, public shaming)?

You’re are right Lorelle. Until the money flow to the spammers is somehow stopped this problem will only get worse for us. I haven’t paid much attention to how they make their money. Is there something that can be done in the marketplace to cut off their revenue streams?

Is it even in an advertisers best interest to stop doing business with a spammer if they are producing eyes on their ads through their underhanded practices? It should be. But is it?

How about an advertising company like Google? Where is their incentive (I mean aside from the fact that it is Evil) not to do business with folks who are getting eyes on their ads via spam?

I’m not sure how it can be done. But only by disrupting their cash flow will we deter them from spamming. Until then it is obviously working and will keep getting worse.

Comment spam bots flow like search engines following incoming links from one blog to another. The only characterization I can find on all of my blogs that “attracts” comment spam is the number of incoming links to the blog. When one new blog went four months comment spam free, within 40 minutes of making my first link to it, comment spam appeared. Whenever a new group of incoming links come to any of my blogs, comment spam levels grows, hitting posts of all dates and types.

Akismet and a combination of Bad Behavior and Spam Karma do the job on all of my blogs, but we need to do more to stop comment spam than just what we do with tools on our blogs.

What can we do outside of our blogs to stop comment spam?

There are ways to stop spammers at their source, which reduces the amount of spam that you have to check to find false positives. I successfully managed to tame my significant spam problem from 250 spams a minute to around 40 a day

I agree that adding do follow probably won’t lead to more comments, but I’m going to do this ASAP as I didn’t realise that WP defaulted to nofollow, which I don’t think is fair, even if my readers don’t know.

I use Akismet and Comment Timeout. Bad Behavior helped a bit, but I got several reports from real people being blocked.

One trend I try to discourage is bloggers using ‘signatures”. For example: Leon – Big Blog Directory [link]. I see this in forums and it is okay there but it isn’t needed in comments and is too similar to comment spam.