Google bought Blogger (Blogspot) a while back and has done nothing with
it. Now it’s is being used by spammers to clog other blogs. Chris Pirillo,
influential organizer of Gnomedex among other things, is calling for
Google to either fix the problem fast or kill Blogger completely.
in a big way. You’re the tallest nail, and you’re really getting
pounded – and now others, who aren’t even using your service, are
getting pounded. Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm, and your
brand is going to go down with it. If your motto truly is to do no
evil, then you need to start putting some resources behind an effort to
curb this train wreck.
And Google has responded, saying they will fix it shortly. Good!
Update in response to the comment from Lefti on the News – I’m adding this from Pirillo’s post.
subscribed search spam for designated keywords. To the tune of
hundreds, if not THOUSANDS, of bunk entries. Who knew “lockergnome” and
“pirillo” would be THAT popular?! Still, I can’t help but think that
others are having the same headaches – and 99% of the crap coming in is
directly from a single domain: blogspot.com.
I don’t know what’s (specifically) making it so insanely easy for these
spammers to get signed into your system, but you need to change that –
ASAP. I’d love to
ban / filter anything and everything that comes from blogspot.com, but
the problem is that I have quite a few friends on that service who are
sitting in the 1% “legitimate” minority.
an authentication system – a captcha of sorts – for every single post
that gets sent through your Blogger service.
Lefti on the News is a great
Blogger blog. So are many others (as he notes in his comment.) However
many are spam factories – and the percentage is much higher
than on other blog platforms. This unfairly slimes reputable Blogger
blogs like Lefti and Atrios, and Pirillo knows that.
Chris Pirillo has a reputation for being fair, friendly, and not
ego-driven. For him to level a broadside like this is quite
extraordinary, and enough people pay attention to what he says that I
expect Google will indeed be plugging the spam holes sooner rather than
later. Good.