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Blog/Comment Spamming – Our Own Fault?

Spam and unwanted advertising is an issue we all have to deal with. But perhaps the amount of spam that is sent out, is a result of our internet usage habits?

One thing I find annoying, is that there are tonnes of websites out there, that publish your work on their websites. The moment you hit "publish" loads of sites automatically gather your post, based on the keywords and tags you have used, and publish it on their own blog.

Most are rather sly in the way they do this, a really small link stating you as the original owner is maintained. This way they cover themselves from any legal threats.

Their aim however is to generate loads of page visits by accumulating thousands of posts about specific topics, posted by other people.

What can we do about it?

The first line of defense should be moderated comments or CAPTCHAS. I have chosen to moderate all comments posted here. Each day, I get about 1-2 genuine comments, and about 150 spam comments.

Then I started thinking, perhaps it would be possible, to pepper our posts with a line of text, such as "this post was taken from cognitivecombine.com".

Using server side code, we could hide this text for users viewing the post on our website, but websites that simply want to aggregate tons of posts would have this line of text appear on their pseudo-post.

The biggest drawback of this idea are genuine users following your content through RSS readers, they would have your line of text plastered throughout the entire article.

What other lines of defense to bloggers and websites have against post-theft and comment-spam??