Blacklists for comment spam

I've been thinking more about the comment spam situation and blacklists in particular. My initial reaction to the blacklist idea was negative because I thoroughly dislike the blacklist concept for email. It tends to bite too many innocent victims. However, the comment spam problem is different. Comment spam is posted to raise a sites ranking in search engines, so this means they're not doing any kind of spoofing and that the URLs that they're posting are real. Because of this I now tend to think the blacklist idea could be fairly effective, especially if there can be a centralized way of compiling blacklist data.

If ever there was something crying out for a web service this is it. I see over on the Movabletype site that there is talk of just such a thing and unfortunately this may become the next must have feature for weblogs. Talk about a waste of time, to me that's an anti-feature. I don't like anti-features.

Posted by Kimbro Staken