DMGCraigslist's Battle with Spam
I noticed recently that my own anti-spam measures are failing, letting lots of spam through. I originally enabled comments (and spam filtering) in May of 2006, and until this month, something less than a dozen spam messages had made it through the filter. But a couple of weeks ago, they started getting through.
It looks like Craigslist is having the same problem. And Techdirt offers a fascinating look at the arms race Craigslist is currently losing:
Spam on Craigslist has been a minor nuisance for years. Not any more. This year, the spammers started winning and are taking over Craigslist. Here's how they did it. Craigslist tries to stop spamming by checking for duplicate submissions. They check for excessive posts from a single IP address. They require users to register with a valid E-mail address. They added a CAPTCHA to stop automated posting tools. And users can flag postings they recognize as spam.
Several commercial products are now available to overcome those little obstacles to bulk posting. A tool called CL Auto Posting Tool is one such product. It not only posts to Craigslist automatically, it has built-in strategies to overcome each Craigslist anti-spam mechanism.
This is really interesting stuff, and certainly feeds the image of spam as a disease that will kill the host even when that's not in its own best interest.