Slightly Shady SEO | Blackhat is Back, Baby.

Dear Akismet,

Up until today, you have lived on my blog. We have lived in not what I would call harmony. I can fully accept that you now refuse to accept trackbacks from my blog; I am a naughty boy, and that is your job(although I will point out I don’t link spam blogs). But there are several aspects of your behavior that I just cannot accept, and will not allow on my blog.

1. You catch only the spam that a monkey could catch. That’s right. I said it. You rarely catch anything of significance. 99% of the spam you catch, is actually amongst my blacklisted keywords anyways, and WELL over the maximum number of links I allow per post. They would be caught anyways. You’re the guard dog that only effectively stops the burglars that the police already have handcuffed. You allow a fair piece of other spam, that does NOT match those conditions to get through.
2. You have a habit of stopping my friends from commenting. Every single day, you catch at least one person who I know personally, and who I KNOW is a whitehat, and who I KNOW doesn’t link spam. But no matter how many times I tell you they’re not spam, you insist that they are. Even Andy Beard has apparently been caught in your piece of shit software.
3. I hate you and your blatant censorship of your own blog. When I make an intelligent, non-abrasive reply on your blog, where you proclaim “It really is spam“, you remove my comments on 3 separate occasions, just for having an opposing view. I’m sorry, but if I know someone personally, and know they don’t link spam, I am going to believe them over you. And you should let your readers know that mistakes happen. And by the way, I checked from a few different IPs, my comment showed. I did not get caught by their filters. It was explicitly removed.
4. I understand not allowing my own trackbacks through; really, I do. However, when I trackback MY OWN BLOG, after having previously having un-spammed it, would it not be acceptable to store something in a database to remember that I have de-spammed them before?
5. Do you not realize that shared hosting exists? If there are 400 domains on my server, and ONE of them submits a trackback that gets marked as spam(be it correctly, or incorrectly), must you take out the entire server? Why not cross reference? Like X domain has shown up using >10 IPs we have listed, so from now on, we list domain X. If it’s all coming out of one IP, and only for one domain you can easily just associate the IP with the domain, and spare the rest.
6. Do you not realize that you are not infallible? I can de-list myself. You allow me to mark as not-spam. Cool. I can do that. But you have no appeals process, and a single “not-spam” does nothing to change this. It takes a lot. I have over 3200 wordpress/akismet enabled blogs out there I never got around to doing anything with. Do you really want to tempt me?
7. Why do you block my VPS IP? My VPS hasn’t done anything to you. I was the first person to use that IP. Every comment from it was done manually. There is not a single piece of blackhat software on it. It, literally, is a copy of firefox, and a copy of apache/mySQL. I did not comment excessively. And yet I am listed.
8. You block comments without a link in them. Why not let it at least hit my moderation queue? There’s not a lot of linkless spam, and I’m not an idiot.
9. Do you realize what a terrible idea IP based blocking is? Try domains(hmm did this guy really post 1000 comments in under 5 minutes?). Try using some decent statistical filtering. Look at e-mail spam. The prevalence of ip-based blocking caused the spread of effin BOTNETS. That’s right. When we rely on it entirely, we get things like the storm worm, and spamthru. There’s PLENTY of ways to footprint spammy messages. Combining these approaches could stop a similar problem for link spam. Lycos spam filtering for example, can not only detect spam messages, but it can tell you what the topic is no matter how much the text is slaughtered. IP-Based blocks not necessary.

In summary, you don’t block anything that would not be caught anyways, you block a lot of people who should not be, you censor your customers from opposing views, and you completely screw over anyone on shared hosting.

No Love Lost,
XMCP

Important:
If you agree, I’m asking people out there to link back to this article(if not from a blog, from a site elsewhere), with either the phrase “Akismet” or “Akismet Sucks” to serve as a warning to those who might be installing it in the future (The varying link text to throw off Google’s various detection algos) Oh yeah, and submit/sphinn this article wherever you please (yeah, the censorship thing pissed me off)

On a related note, SlightlyShadySEO will be switching hosting(or at least IPs), and anti-spam software sometimes in the next week. So if there’s a momentary down time, don’t sweat it.

Peace Out,
XMCP

PS: On an unrelated note, check out the 30 Day Free Wordze Promotion that’s going on. Clicking the link in the entry helps to support SlightlyShadySEO, and also gets you guys a badass resource for site building.

Posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 1:10 pm in the category:blogging. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post.