Offer any opportunity to participate in a web application and it seems you must be prepared to deal with spam. For all practical purposes, the comment portion of this blog has been shut down because of spammers. The hoops one must jump through before you are allowed to offer comment probably eliminates all but my students.
I am now having to deal with spam on my social bookmarking site. I have a simple”Scuttle” site that allows registered users to add bookmarks. I have also modified the basic code to allow users to evaluate the quality of the sites that can be accessed. The site is intended to organize links to sites focused on educational applications of technology.
Recently, groups of users have signed up using fake names with what appears to be the intent of creating links to commercial sites. My site has some protection measures, but these individuals clearly know how to circumvent the protection. I am not certain I understand their motivation. I know that some attempt to spoof Google into thinking many sites link to a target site in order to boost the page rank for that site, but spamming Scuttle sites seems a labor intensive way to go about such a strategy. The spam appears to be added manually and once I notice the changes it takes me only a few seconds to eliminate inappropriate links. I keep thinking there must be something I am missing about this strategy, but nothing obvious occurs to me.
