Some of the Quikonnex publishers have experienced what is called "Comment Spam". Visitors to the Quikonnex blog-like pages post comments unrelated to the publisher's article and post with user names like 'online poker', 'phentermine', 'mortgages', 'flowers', etc. and the comment itself is promoting their website. First of all, Quikonnex has put together a system to battle this comment spam problem, but I'd like to answer your questions as to "why do they do this?"
The answer why is "search engine rankings". It's not that they're expecting your readers to visit their sites, they don't care about you nor your readers. All they want are links out from your channel and Quikonnex.com. It's widely assumed that you can increase a website's search engine ranking by getting other sites to link to you. Spammers obviously make this same assumption and they also know that sites that support blogging technology and RSS are very popular with the search engines. It's not uncommon for an article posted on a Quikonnex.com to be spidered within a few minutes of it being posted. If the article is spidered, then the comments are spidered as well. If the article is a good one, then it's liable to move up on the Google pages for it's keywords and that prompts more spiders to come looking. Again, links in comment are also followed. Adam Kalsey, kalsey.com, posted an interesting article, back in July 04, about a
new comment spam technique. Here he describes how a spammer will post comments on sites that aren't monitoring for such spam attacks. "They find a site that doesn’t delete comment spam and fill it with links. Then they boost the PR of that site by spamming it in blog comments. Once the spam-friendly’s site has in increased Google ranking, all those spammed links in their comments will get a boost in rank as well." So you may see a comment on a item that is linked to a legitimate website. If it's unrelated to your article, then this is probably what is happening. Sites that don't eliminate comment spam will soon find themselves on the bottom of the search engine listings.
There are legitimate companies being abused by this technique. I personally do not think that mortgage companies and online flower merchants are fully aware of how the folks they've hired (or who their vendors have hired) are living up to their promises of increasing traffic, boosting search engine rankings or increasing sales on their sites. These unscrupulous marketers not only use email spam, but they're using the increasing popularity of blogs to "help" their customers. The trap that the legitimate company may fall into is that the spammers techniques work. Once the money starts rolling in, it takes a strong company owner to fire the marketer they've hired.
How is Quikonnex.com going to combat this problem? There are several techniques that other blogging software vendors have developed. Some use the Turing image method (you type in the number or word you see in an image), some use text based codes or key phrases, and others simply block IP addresses. I've chosen to start out with a blacklist of comment spammers. I won't go into all the details of how it's contructed in order to keep them from figuring out workarounds. Right now, I'm not going to incorporate any of the image or text field security methods as I think they limit usability (if it comes to that though I will add these in as additional layers of protection). The black list method will not stop a spammer posting the first comment spam, but once reported by a publisher or other Q member or by our monitoring, then they're dead meat.
Comment spam protection is one reason that the Quikonnex community is such a powerful tool. If each of our publishers were running their own blogging software and creating their own RSS feeds, then they'd be responsible for fighting these attacks on their own. With Quikonnex, they don't have to.
