Livejournal comment spam

I woke up this morning thinking about Livejournal comment spam. I mean, do they get any? How do they prevent it? Do thet use an mt-blacklist equivalent? Of course a lot of the problem is mitigated by the fact that lj is effectively one big trust network and you can disable people who aren’t already on your list of friends from leaving coments. But this isn’t the default behaviour. By default anonymous comments can be left, so, what do they do to prevent abuse?

It turns out most of the answers are on the LiveJournal Spam: Overview / FAQ page, and I could quote it extensively, but you may as well just go and read for yourself – it basically says “we can change anything whenever we want because we’re a closed system and we also have some extra systems in place”. Certainly of the few people I know who have livejournal accounts I’ve never seen any evidence of comment spam so obviously the measures they’ve got in place seem to work.

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2 thoughts on “Livejournal comment spam”

  1. Actually, yes.

    A livejournal run-off, Caleida, just got hit by it.

    I use Movabletype as well, and I was wondering the same thing a few weeks ago.

    However, for botting-spam, as is very common with Movabletype, it looks like there is no architecture whatsoever, besides deleting the comments and keeping track of IPs.
    Examples: http://www.caleida.com/users/miyavi/39473.html?thread=746801#t746801
    http://www.caleida.com/users/miyavi/48104.html?thread=748008#t748008

    I recieved about twenty more, and so did many of my friends, communities, et cetera.

    Although Caleida is a bit of a wild west compared to Livejournal (livejournal has far more moderation and spam prevention), with anonymous spam-commenting, you end up having to throw the baby out with the bath water — friends who do not have journals may want to post anonymously, but botting forces anonymous commenting to be turned off.

    There are no measures at Caleida, because no one ever thought it would happen. =)

    Joel

  2. Ah, weblogging, so naive 🙂

    Still, interesting to see that it is happening – from a cursory glance it always looks like the centralised systems are staying ahead of the game, but given your comment and the fact that I got two pieces of spam the other day, it looks like this arms race isn’t over quite yet 🙂

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