Jason Calacanis comments on my post on Weblogs Inc’s new Star Spam system and writes:
‘Darren: I have not given all the details on the system yet, but it does handle automated comment spam. Blogsmith (our blog platform) forces folks to validate every comment via email right now, so if you bomb us with 1,000 comment spams you have to click 1,000 emails. No one has done that yet. Also, if you get -1 Stars that email can never validate again—it’s blacklisted. All 75 of our blogs share the same black list so if you get banned on Engadget you’re banned on my blog or Autoblog as well. Was thinking we should let folks API into the Star System some day, so you could say “I trust Jason’s judgement and anyone he bans or rewards I will ban or reward.” Could be big.’
No one has to ‘click’ on the links – It is just a fetchmail combined with some procmail and a wget.
Never post from an email adress again? What’s an email address again?
And on the other side, I have seen to many times me comments – on topic, ‘decent’, without links or stuff like that in it to be ‘caught’ by Spam protection, that there are sites I don’t leave comments any more just from the kind of spam protection I can see right away.
Without putting Jason down, he’s still not mentioning the main point of the star system, and that is to encourage more commenting across the board, more comments = more traffic, and the system rewards regular visitors how comment on multiple occasions with decent comments. It’s brillant, but lets be honest about it.