Comment Spam is becoming a problem for webloggers. Adam Kalsey has written a Comment Spam Manifesto declaring war on people who want to use our pages as advertisement and abuse our hard-earned Google rankings. While I haven’t yet been a victim of this problem, I sympathize with those who’re getting hundreds of fake comments a day. We run our websites because we enjoy them, and getting preyed on isn’t cool.
What worries me about the new war on spam is that it could lead to some legal troubles. If people really start going after alleged spammers and succeed in getting their ISPs to shut their sites down, a lot of lawsuits could spring up. What the weblogging world needs is a common comment spam policy. It needs to lay out exactly what an offending post will be, dictate what the host must be able to demonstrate in order to make a claim, and prescribe a list of conditions that must be documented. Likewise, it must also provide legitimate ways an innocent accused party can show that he didn’t do anything wrong. This policy should be something that lots of people agree on, freely distributed, and should be documented on every site that uses it.
Suggestions and TrackBacks are welcome (but not from spammers).