Alex Barnett's blog

indeed. i'm surprised there haven't been any additional anti-spam measures implemented into weblogs.asp.net/blogs.msdn.com.

i would have thought, one of the better ones would be implementing some sort of keyword filtering.

maybe use some regex or something to catch the keywords and throw them into a comment moderation queue.

i think over the past month or so, i'm seeing many posts on weblogs.asp.net/blogs.msdn.com complaining about the spam.

i'm sure many technique could well be implemented, but the fight against spammers is a never ending one.

you find a new technique to block them (spam), they (spammers) find a new technique to bypass it.

perhaps have a look at the mail clients, and have a look at how they are implementing the spam filtering. i think that's the right direction for blog spam filtering.

Movable Type has a tool that allows you to filter using regex. It is not perfect (folks get more and more clever) but in looking at the log for one blog I have on Movable Type, it is amazing the number of spam entries that it does catch.

Why not just drag and drop my CAPTCHA control on your ASP.NET WebForm?

http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/CaptchaControl.asp

;)

Doublas: I think the RegEx would be the minimum that they should implement.

I'm using WordPress for mine. I've not gotten any comment spam bypassing it for the past month. Which I think is quite a good record.

I've only started agreesively adding words to filter out (at the end of October). I've gotten in excess of 2000 spam comments that didn't get through during that time. I think less than 10 have actually made it through the filters. One of the problems I encountered was that the spammers have started using some sort of HTML Encoding to bypass the filters.

Not really sure on the CAPTCHA idea though.

Sites like Engadget send you an email to confirm your own comment before it appears. It is good, for now.

Or you can require some sort of authentication, but many would get annoyed by that.

Anyway, what I'd love to see made available in the next release of .Text is at a minimum, allow bloggers to whack in their own RegEx, or at least word filtering.

I think what annoys people the most is having to turn off comments due to spam.

It annoys the blog author, and the blog readers.

In the end, I think there can be a lot of arguments for and against all the different approaches, but I think it would be agreed that there needs to be something implemented quite soon to help the fight against comment spam here quite soon.

.. and why it won't work!