I noticed this over the weekend whilst looking around. I started hitting 'next' on the Blogger tool bar and came across no less than 30 "splogs" almost successively. Each of them contained posts specific to the day I saw them and no others.

Before moving to worpress, I ran my blog on blogspot. The old blog still exists, and over the last week I went from zero comment spam on the old blog to hundreds a day. I had to go back and disable the comment feature.

Obviously it isn't a big deal for me since I am now hosting on my own. It is one of the traps of 'free' blogs...there is always a price to pay!

The comment spam has gone absolutely out of control. For some reason blogspot has word verification (captcha-style) off by default. Turning it on fixed the spam for me. The other problem is the amount of spamblogs. I was trying to find some info in Technorati the other day and the spam is getting overwhelming. Worse, technorati has no "report spam" link, although they are thinking about the issue. Technorati uses automated methods to identify spamblogs. Philipp, you may be interested in some of the graphs posted here:

http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/10/53.html

"In the past 2 weeks, there were 805,000 new weblogs created. In addition, Technorati tracked an additional 39,000 new fake and spam weblogs, which means that about 4.6% of the total weblogs tracked were fake or spam."

How does Technorati know what's a spam blog?

Right now the method they use seems to be purely technological. They can check the number of links relative to text and the number of links to the same site. The number of inbound links must also assist with this decision. They haven't released a lot of specifics but you can get some idea of the criteria here:

http://www.technorati.com/weblog/2005/08/38.html
"...Sometimes it is done to influence page rank-type algorithms, which monitor the number of pages (in this case blog postings) what link to a page or a site. In the more general web sense, these are called "Link Farms". Sometimes it is to push higher rankings of those posts and blogs for certain keywords, also known as "keyword stuffing". There's been quite a bit already written about link farms and keyword stuffing, it is a pretty well-known technique used by some people to influence search ranking. It is also pretty easy to catch, and most search engines actively penalize or exclude these sites from their index."

Why can't Blogger require word verification to set up a blog? Would that stop the scourge?

AFAIK, they're already doing Captchas for a while now, but didn't do it from the beginning.

Any reason you're not using a small roadbump to stop some of your comment spam, Philipp?

I'm not suggesting Captchas, because I dislike their anti-accessibility side-effects. But maybe something text-based akin to this? :-

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/wordpress/wp-gatekeeper.html

Milly, I find the method you mention interesting for stopping automated comment spam, if the problem ever increases. I really dislike Captchas which are often hard to read and always annoying to type. But I don't think I have much *automated* comment spam. I do have much manual comment spam (which I delete daily), often actually replying to the post with something like "cool link to xy" followed by a few lines of unrelated, spammy URLs, so these guys could answer the question too. On a side-note, I also delete a lot of different other stuff (asking for Gmail/30gigs invitations and so on), so I won't get rid of this job anytime soon...

Oh, I didn't realise your spam was manual – what a pain.

Possibly you might automate some blocking (say with a blacklist of known spammy URLs, e.g. that hop.to stuff I keep seeing), but I take your point.

Oh well, when the shop sales skyrocket you'll be able to hire a cleaner ;)

I have some words banned, like v1agra and stuff, but the spammers are creative :)
I really don't know how much is automated here... I think I can be lucky I'm not using a mainstream blogging software, for it might be much more lucrative for a spammer to learn how to abuse it as there's a larger effect!