It was a nice writing you have done and there are a few factors that you have overlooked. You say “Some of my comment spammers would surely have interesting ideas to contribute if only they had the luxury of time.” but the reality is quite different than that. The correct one should be “Some of my comment spammers would surely have interesting ideas to contribute if only they had the luxury of MONEY.”

Some years ago, I was a paid “spammer” where I had to post comments that are relevant to the article with some back-link. The article should relevant to the website of the URL, so the URL’s lead generation would boost. For people who hire others for such activity paid about $20 for about 100+ comment posts. Do you know how much is $20 for a person who is living in a country where GDP (per capita) is below $400? This is the lower end of the spam comment machine. Just the execution front.

I myself love mathematics and I believe forums like these should be free of spamming and it is an unethical thing to do. But this is how Internet works. And I really appreciate the attitude of the others who have commented, as they focus on getting rid of spamming, rather than accusing the person who physically posts it. SEO has injected a lot of bad things to web, and many good things too!

Anyways, this is a nice forum for mathematics.

After moderation, the links become clickable. The longer the lead time on moderation …

about that spam screening, was the sequins in carrots ?

Anyway, I don’t want to be a SPAMer myself, but opinions on my SPAM control technique are very welcome.

http://www.isegura.es/blog/stop-spam-your-site-being-invisible-honeytrap-drupal-comments-form

I just really want to find a SPAM control techique that works without causing much inconvenience to me or the good users. I find CAPTCHA a bit annoying, so I tried other solutions. Opinions welcome.

On the other hand, if you are concerned about allowing other people to ‘link back’ to themselves and form a network of sorts, URL filtering is probably the way to go (depending on how much of a pattern they have).

I don’t think it makes sense to close comments on the older posts. Maybe just withholding those comments or allowing comments by email would work.

Also, a heuristic approach to blocking links might be used, where the occurrence of certain terms is used to determine whether a link is likely to be spam/undesirable.

There is also a possibility of hiding dubiously spammy comments like Youtube does, or moving them elsewhere. Of course, all this would depend in the blog technology, but it isn’t impossible.

I don’t think it makes sense to close comments on the older posts. Maybe just withholding those comments or allowing comments by email would work.

Also, a heuristic approach to blocking links might be used, where the occurrence of certain terms is used to determine whether a link is likely to be spam/undesirable.

People regularly pay $100-$300 for a link from an old site that’s established: those are typically ‘good’ links, but crummy links from blogs and forums are worth at least a buck.

See

http://slightlyshadyseo.com/ and http://bluehatseo.com/ to learn about cutting edge techniques.

Forgive my technological ignorance, but how hard it would be for the baddies to create malware that would add such links to all posts originated from the infected computer? Maybe simply by automatically filling this Homepage URL box that was offered to me.

Another approach would be to analyze the universe of legitimate links in the history of comments on this blog, and try to find a pattern in those. If such a pattern existed, you could have a whitelist-style filter that would only let through some comment links.

A third option would be to make the spam screening question much harder. At least that way, your low-paid spammers would be furthering their mathematical education…