Just as a note - since I did a lot of comment cleanup this morning - if your comment has a commercial url in it (i.e. if the url you give as a part of your identity is a commercial site, not a blog or news site), we automatically consider the comment spam. If there is a commercial url in the body of the content, we'll decide on a case-by-case basis (are you a long-time commenter, what is the context of the url, etc.).
So if you're looking to raise the organic SEO rankings of your business site, please don't try to do it by posting comments here. It just makes for more tidying up that we have to do.
A.L. and I are discussing this policy. My point to him, and we'll see what he thinks...
AL: Let's talk about that - What do we do with the folks who leave tangentially meaningful comments - like the "marriage" folks did this morning - with a link to an obviously commercial site?
JK: Is the site a corporate site? Or is it selling something directly? That's one key distinction to me: are you selling something from the page you send us to? If you are, even if you're relevant, spam.
As opposed to someone from Apple commenting, and putting "Apple.com" in the URL. Even though Apple does have the Apple Store on site.
The other key is, of course, the "tangentially relevant" description. To me, a policy of:
"IF you're only marginally relevant, we'll ding you as spam if your URL is corporate/commercial, but might, at our discretion, give you more leeway if your URL isn't there or isn't commercial."
vs.
"if your comment has a commercial url in it (i.e. if the url you give as a part of your identity is a commercial site, not a blog or news site), we automatically consider the comment spam"
Those are significant differences, and my formulations may be closer to what A.L. meant. We'll see. Where we absolutely agree is that the phony tactics re: raising your search engine ratings have become more sophisticated, and a defense is required.
I've been trying to be fairly (in both senses) aggressive in zapping stuff that has a commercial site for the URL field of the post, or even a too-polemical site. Particularly when content is "one-note" in tone, with novel nicknames; even more so when I see a burst of posts of questionable quality or origin, all from the same IP address.
I will take direction regarding future policy, of course.
Spammers must be dragged out of their filthy Saddam-hovels and used to decorate sturdy oaks, but that might have to wait for a period of anarchy. Perhaps in the chaos that will ensure after we get hit by that plasma-bolt from another galaxy.
In the meantime, I urge no concessions. A spammer's idea of a brilliant observation is something like "Isn't it wonderful that we all have different opinions?" and even if they say something more useful than that it's still just a spammer posing as a human.
We all thought Skynet would be sending killer robots after us, when actually its just going to drown us in Spam.
Kudos to all who toil to keep the discussion above the 'usual standard' for blogs. I deem your work a success.
Why did AL extend the ban on Alan in the JK Spitzer post's comment thread, is there some previous egregious comments by him that make him subject to particularly stringent filtering?
Mark
I'm unaware of any extension. Here's one thread pertinent to Alan's temporary banning.