That is the only way to battle spam with 100% effectiveness, yes. But there are other ways to do it that can still be very good, even though they're not perfect. The filtering for comment spam in Ping is subpar, and I don't think the difficulty of the task excuses the fact that Apple has done a poor job.
The spam filter on GMail seems to work well enough.
talking about comment spam here.
What's the difference between email spam and comment spam, exactly? Why don't online forums use Bayesian filtering to get rid of comment spam?
I haven't followed SpamAssassin in several years, but have any startups ever tried running their comments through it?
As you point out, it seems like many of their rules for emails would apply equally well to blog comments.
Doesn't Akismet work the same way as gmail's filter?
Re:Apple's Ping Overrun with Spam
by jasonlotito on Friday September 03, 2010 @12:57PM
(#1660220)
Yeah, you missed the point here.
...or C) limit comment rights to a group of responsible, traceable people
...or D) moderate new registrants for a probationary period
...or E) enlist some of your users-in-good-standing for moderation
...or F) moderate just those comments which an automated system flags as having high spam likelihood (links, images, emails)
...or G) require some small demonstration/forfeit of value (such as a posting fee) for each post. (Risking a non-probationary account that took effort to create is a special case of this.)
...or H) blended variants of the above
none of those will work 100%
Re:Apple's Ping Overrun with Spam
by CountHackulus on Friday September 03, 2010 @02:42PM
(#1660626)
They don't need to work 100%, just better than it works now.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Anything else can be bypassed