This is about comment spam, sort of. Not the biggest problem here for various reasons but to bits were posted here the other day and it just annoys me. It really reduces the potential we got with this cheap-to-free communication channel blogging thing. In the end I'm going to ask those who comment without logging in how much grief they would consider logging in to be. There will actually be benefits beyond a personal sig and icon.

I've been following the efforts to address comment spam. The SpamAssassin Wiki, on its BlogSpamAssassin page says

To summarize, I think that a permanent solution to weblog spam needs to:

1. Eliminate the benefits of spamming (boost in pagerank). 2. Not eliminate the benefits of linking in legitimate comments. 3. Require minimal maintenance. 4. Be accountable and trustworthy to the user. 5. Not disrupt or delay legitimate comments.

and I honestly think analyzing the content of the comments is a Sisyphean task.

To make a long story short, I've figured out how to make comments by commenters that aren't logged in invisible to folks who aren't logged in, i.e.

• If you're logged in you see all comments and all your comments are seen.
• If you're not logged in you only see comments made by folks who were logged in when they posted it

The benefit here is that Google doesn't log in when it hits the site. So it will never see any comment by a spammer.

This actually eliminates any benefit to posting comment spam .

The trick-ass part is that would have impact on conversation flow. I don't think it's a huge issue, but I've been wrong about folks' reactions before. I'm still awaiting a whole series of epiphanies about social software.

But the fact is, we've pretty much been forced to verify our commenters one way or another. And there's a whole user interface thing that needs be done because obviously there will be anonymous comments that demand general visibility. A comment moderation system could be used to let your registered users mark something as spam (which hides it until you pass judgment) or promote worthy stuff to visibility. In fact, I have one rather sloppily installed here that would be pretty straightforward to hack.

So anyway, the question is to those who comment without logging in. And actually I have no idea as I write how many folks that would be. I need to check that. Basically if number five in the above quote is covered I'll add this to my short list (as in, I'll change the three or so lines of code that does the main deed and worry about the user interface thing later).