Between November 27, 2004 and today, 81042 comments were rejected by lemonodor's MT-Blacklist plugin. That's an average of about 795 comments per day. As a rough estimate of the trend of the data, comments were rejected during the first 63 days at an average rate of 650 per day, and during the next 39 days at a rate of 1027 per day.
First I'd like to say HOLY SHIT! That's a lot of spam
Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to say thank you, Jay Allen, for MT-Blacklist.
I'm pretty sure that any technique that relies on manual cleanup of spam from world-writeable web space is doomed. I'm also pretty sure that nofollow will be mostly ineffective against spam and will actually lead to a small degradation in overall result quality in search engines that respect it.
Posted by jjwiseman at March 09, 2005 11:51 AMWow, what do you base the second "pretty sure" on, John? I work on this stuff, and 1) degradations/improvements of result quality take a lot of data to conclude anything about, and 2) my own guess is that it will help (in a very minor way).
I totally endorse the first "pretty sure" though (that manual cleanup of webspam doesn't scale...) :)
Posted by: Timboy on March 9, 2005 01:50 PM