Congeries of cross connected concepts
I have seen a big drop off in comment junk at the various weblogs I operate. I keep the last 60 days of junk comments at every weblog and one of them has droppped from 11,000 junk comments in that time span to less than 300. The other ones have dropped so dramatically but they are all done very noticeably. Trackback junk, on the other hand, is way up on the weblogs where I didn’t implement my full set of countermeasures (you can see the stats for this weblog in the right side bar, near the top).
I am not sure what this means. It could be that the set of comment junkers is smaller and they are mostly IP banned. Perhaps various efforts have rendered comment junk insufficiently rewarding. What concerns me is that there is a growing set of people who are simply dropping trackbacks, which are easier to do without than comments.
Still, it may be that there is a tipping point with weblog junk that doesn’t exist with regard to junk e-mail, in that if junkers can’t get enough junk out there to influence search engines, the junk has now value.
