Pinging Knight

I have been somewhat neglecting FallenEarth lately. Particularly new blog requests; I apologize to Logan Bruister Brewster and Ivy Turnbow for delaying things for so long. I will have your blogs up before the day is passed, if you are still interested. As many of you have noticed, FallenEarth has become popular enough now to receive comment spam. The purpose of comment spam is not really to entice any blog readers to view lolita porn or buy viagra—I hope none of you have from any link coming from FallenEarth, anyway. The idea behind comment spam is to take advantage of our Googlejuice. The way Google PageRank technology works, the higher the ranking of the site the link is from, the higher the benefit to the site being linked to. Blogs in general tend to receive pretty high ranks due to the extensive amount of links and fresh content. Thus, spammers are attacking the blogs. Before, Loup-Vert made a call to action to report the spammers so I could block them. It is very much appreciated and there were a few of you that responded, and I blocked their IPs. It's not a feasible long term solution, though; like most spam, the volume will only increase. Spammers search for other spammer's comments on a blog, and that is why often if you get spammed comments from multiple sources, they will usually be on the same entry. That is why it is very important to delete the comment quickly and rebuild the page it was on—after giving me the details, so I can stop the guy in the future. We shouldn't need to police the blogs, though. Not all of you have new comment e-mail notification on, or even check the blogs very often. Since the spam is usually not on the most recent entry, it can be hard to tell it is there. I've also been blocking IP(Internet Protocol) addresses, which is not ideal. If any of the spammers went through an anonymous proxy, I could be blocking giant groups of innocent people. So, I looked for a better solution. I discovered Jay Allen's wonderful MT-Blacklist plugin. He and other bloggers who detest spam had the same problem (to a much worse extent, I suspect) and created this somewhat recently. It blocks comments with links to questionable content, based upon a blacklist. It has a search and de-spam feature, complete with multiple blog rebuilding. It is also now installed on FallenEarth. Die, spammers. Though it is a huge leap forward in terms of spam defense, it is not perfect. A blacklist never is; new domains will always sprout up and site names will become less and less obvious to detect as spam. So, if you guys still get any comment spam, please report it to me. Thanks.