Symphonious

Living in a state of accord.

Category Archives: Blogs

Clever Spam Reduction Technique

I discovered one of our client's company blogs1 tonight because they mentioned they'd just upgraded to EditLive! 6. Reading through the backlog I discovered they've found a clever way to reduce the impact of form spam that I hadn't come across before2 – only accept the submission if it uses multipart/form-encoding not just a plain post. Like most techniques it won't work if everyone does it but it's another interesting way to differentiate.

I do have to wonder why spam bots aren't all just using an embedded browser these days though3 – there seems to be a huge number of ways that they get caught out needlessly.

Anyway, I noticed in their support history there's a feature request I can solve for them easily via our plugin architecture. If someone could throw a squishy toy at me in the morning to add it to the list of LiveWorks! article ideas that' be great4.

1 – note the first cool use of blogs – learning about your customers↩

2 – note the second cool use of blogs – learning interesting stuff that may or may not be useful in the future↩

3 – watch the comments for the third cool use of blogs – I'm sure someone will have additional insight on this↩

4 – note the fourth and most cool use of blogs – using the inherent delay as a reminder mechanism5↩

5 – also, footnotes are cool and I just haven't used them enough lately↩

The Fine Line Between Service And Splog

The antileech plugin so far has done nothing towards actually blocking content and frankly doesn't really show a lot of promise that it ever will, however it has been interesting seeing where my content pops up. One that looks rather odd to me is dcomments.com. Frankly it looks just like a splog but it doesn't have any ads or links out to other sites. It does however republish all my content without any extra comments and has the absolute minimum of linkage back to symphonious.net. In fact, regularly through the site the term "Symphonious" is used but linked to their version of the content – the only link back is labelled "Original article here", right about an Add Comment button.

What the site claims to add is the ability to view RSS feeds in a news reader (the old type, not NetNewsWire) – essentially an NNTP gateway. The add comment function seems to be in debugging at the moment because it just displays some JavaScript popups with "Check 1" type messages and the comment never actually appears.

There are a few things that really count against dcomments.com and make it look even more like a splog:

  • It claims to be publisher opt-in based, but I didn't opt-in and they still republish every entry on this blog. Most likely they don't have any verification mechanism.
  • They don't provide a simple way for authors to have their blog removed. The contact page lists a few mailing lists, but no simple email address to send complaints to.
  • Every page, including pages where essentially the only content is taken from my blog, is labelled "© 2006 -2007 dcomments.com" and they never mention what license my content is under.

Overall I don't really mind dcomments.com reusing my content, but they also aren't putting any real effort in to benefit blog owners by driving traffic back to them and appropriately acknowledging them. It also shows just how fine a line it is between being a value adding service and a splog. With some minor tweaks to make the author of content clearer and drive move traffic their way instead of locking users in, dcomments.com could move well away from that line and be a useful, if exceptionally niche, service. Right now though, it takes a lot of faith in the good-will of mankind to not label them a splog.

Leeches

I suppose I should be happy but I'm not sure I am. It appears that my blog has moved from the insignificant long tail to the worth spamming and leeching long tail. Like every blog, I've always seen comment spam coming in, but I'm not seeing targeted comment spam picking out the posts with the best page rank and focussing on them. I'm also suddenly seeing splogs leeching my content.

For the most part, I don't care what people do with my content so I reported them to Technorati (who said they'd look into it and then did nothing) and went back to ignoring them. Unfortunately, it turns out they're not just sending track backs to my original post, but also to everything I link to which is going too far for me to ignore. So I'm trying out AntiLeech – no idea if it will work or not but it's worth a try. If my posts suddenly just claim that you're a splog please let me know.  I'll be super careful to avoid blocking any of the Planet aggregators that wind up publishing my content – they're a very useful part of the blog ecosystem so don't panic if you're a planet administrator but please do let me know if I mess it up and cause you any problems.

Bloggers And Pictures

Apparently someone told bloggers that adding pictures to your posts helps make things easier to read. Unfortunately, what they forgot to mention is that the pictures should actually be part of the message or at least tangentially related. Take for instance this post by Joel Spolsky about UI design and alarm clocks. Scattered through the article are pictures of random buildings, including for some unknown reason one with a sign reading "Cemetery for Soldiers' Dogs". Wouldn't pictures of alarm clocks make more sense? What about a frustrated old woman? A sleep deprived man? All these things would actually relate to the content and perhaps enhance the message the post is trying to make. Buildings however only distract from the actual message – particularly quizzical things like a cemetery for soldiers' dogs.

Of course, Joel isn't the only one, his post is just what pushed me over the edge to blog about it. It doesn't matter how cool you think the shadows or reflections are, if the image isn't related to the actual content it's just wasting bandwidth.