I found this at Lynn Sislo's place. From the Comment Spam Manifesto:
Posting an email address in a public place is not an invitation for companies to send unsolicited advertisements. Hosting a public Web forum or Usenet server does not give companies permission or the moral right to advertise on it. And soliciting comments from the public on a weblog entry or other Web page does not mean that companies or individuals are invited to use it for their advertising purposes.Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected, and more technologically savvy than the average email user. We control the medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You’ve picked a fight with us and it’s a fight you cannot win.
We have complained amongst ourselves, tried technological solutions, and tried to understand the nature of comment spam. And we are done. We now intend to fight back.
Spammers are hereby put on notice. Your comments are not welcome. If the purpose behind your comment is to advertise yourself, your Web site, or a product that you are affiliated with, that comment is spam and will not be tolerated.
Bloggers will track you down and notify your hosting providers about your activities. We will tell your ISPs what you are using their connections for. We will let the makers of the products you are advertising know of your despicable sales methods. We will hit you where it hurts by attacking your source of income.
You can move to a new host, find a new ISP, or sign up for a different affiliate plan. The end result will be the same. Each time you rise out of the muck we will strike you down and send you back to the hole you crawled out of.
Our sites belong to us and we intend to keep it that way. It will no longer be profitable to advertise through comment spam.
Indeed: I pay for the domain name and for the server space, just so some slime can post his ads for Texas Hold 'Em and Cialis? I don't think so. But all the same, I've had hundreds of such "comments" posted to my blog -- sad to say, more spam comments than comments. I liked seeing the numbers, but that's a corruption even of a numbers game, so I had to delete them all. Ugh.
I don't know that I already agree that the spammers have picked a fight they "cannot win." They certainly have automation on their side, and ISP banning doesn't seem to work. I'd be interested if someone would write an article on how to track down an ISP through an IP address, because I certainly don't know how to do it.
With the Usenet and with e-mail, it wasn't really clear, in America's legal environment, that such things were property, or, if property were involved, to whom it belonged. But it seems to me that blogs do stand differently: I've named this blog and put my own name to it, for instance, and as I wrote above, I pay for the domain name and the server space. I think it's pretty clear that this site is mine, not public property or a common carrier of any sort. But we need to do something to protect our property, and perhaps this is the right way to begin.
(Actually, as I mentioned here, Eric Scheie had a fabulous suggestion for dealing with spammers a while back...seems even more appropriate now!)
(Hat tip: Reflections in D Minor)
Posted by Craig Ceely at January 25, 2005 11:43 PM