Reading Eric’s More Spam To Follow on the newly introduced rel="nofollow" and his measures against spam, it occurred to me that fighting spam might become some kind of secret art in the future.
The cause for this development is quite simple: the longer spammers do not know and unterstand the countermeasure utilizied on a site the longer that site will stay spam-free. It’s not very attractive to write spam-scripts just for spamming a single site with its individualized countermeasures. Here it’s where the secret comes in. It’s just like these cryptographic algorithms (CA) that work as long no one gets to know the algorithm (there are other CAs where the algorithm is known but the ciphertext is considered secure.). The longer that (effective) method is kept secret the longer a site will be ‘at peace’.
So an author of an effective countermeasure against spam is actually not interested in publishing that approach. The more people implement this method, the more interesting this method gets for spammers who soon will have scripts to counter that countermeasure.
I wonder what will be stronger, the pressure of the spammers or the feeling of interedependence and mutual aid in the community of bloggers and web-authors in general. Will we have fortresses or an army?
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That’s absolutely correct. It depresses me, because I think sharing information and ideas is the main reason the Web is interesting, but it’s the only sensible defensive measure. The only time I’m ever going to document my successful spam-fighting techniques is after they’ve been rendered useless due to advances in spammer tech.
Not only do I think you’re right, Steffen, I firmly believe this has already happened; thus, I say that it already is a secret art, not that it might become one. I’ve occasionally spoken with others who are using completely home-brewed and undocumented spam-fighting methods, and I’ve employed some of my own in the past. I’m fairly confident that there are a number of people out there who have done the same.
I’d seriously consider creating a “spam-fighters” mailing list of some kind for people to privately swap their approaches to fighting spam, except it would eventually be infiltrated by spammers. That would turn a resource into a weapon, and I’m not interested in being the vehicle for such a turn of events.
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