Spam Fighting

Via BoingBoing comes this post at The Republic of Geektronica: The Strange World of Blogspot Spamblogs, which points out a new kind of spam on Blog*Spot. People are creating seemingly legitimate news blogs which contain spam links cleverly hidden by CSS. Geektronica, you rock. Thanks for finding this sneaky spam. We're hoping to leverage more of this kind of help from the community in the future.

But wait! There are a few things I'd like to address in the Geektronica post. The post states that Blogspot "apparently does not have a policy against" spam but our Terms of Service states that we will terminate spam (and we do). It also says "Blogspot now requires CAPTCHA authentication to start a new account." We require CAPTCHA authentication to create new blogs, not new accounts. There's a big difference there because one account can have many blogs. While we're on the subject of CAPTCHA let me say that we never thought it would "fix the problem" of spam. CAPTCHA has had an impact but also has accessibility drawbacks that prevent it from being a complete solution.

The braintrust here at Google has lots of experience dealing with spam and the Blogger crew is actively leveraging this talent to find new ways to combat the problem. Kudos to The Republic of Geektronica for taking note of this new wrinkle and yes, we are working hard against spamblogs.