[spam-stopper] Long-term plans

[unteins at somuchgeek.com]

It is an interesting problem how to pay for these sorts of things. Its too
bad you can't leverage the mass adoption a la Bit Torrent and have
everyone who uses it foot part of the cost in terms of server resources,
which is most likely going to be the bulk of expense.

Out of curiosity, and I am thinking off the top of my head here, is there
any reason why the system couldn't be setup as a hybrid local/remote?
Basically, each client hosts a local version which checks the spaminess of
a comment and if it is spam, rejects it locally, possibly creating some
kind of update record to send on periodically to the main site (though if
it is already detectable as spam, I don't know if that would be of any
use) and if a comment passes the local spam check only those get sent on
to the remote server? If they are flagged as spam by the remote, the
remote must have better data to check against so an update is run?

Should keep the overal server needs down, if it is feasible.

If the cost of spam exceeded the cost of preventing spam, then I might pay
for it. But currently there are effective free spam tools out there
(including my own two little hands deleting the crud flood) so I doubt I'd
pay for the service at this juncture, but I am sure there are those who
would. I would be totally willing to include a link as payment if that was
asked. I'm a little annoyed that Ethan Zohn (Survivor Africa Winner) uses
WordPress and stripped out the credits (http://eZhon.com and my post
about:
http://somuchgeek.com/2005/09/18/survivor-africa-winner-ethan-uses-wordpress/)

> Assuming this whole things works, and we don't know if it will yet, I'm
> still figuring out how to make it self-sustaining in the long term.
>
> The obvious answer is to have it be a paid-only service, so all costs
> are covered from the beginning, but I really feel like the web needs
> serious help with comment spam, and charging for basic protection isn't
> going to make the web a better place.
>
> I would be more comfortable with something where it was free for regular
> people, and only businesses or enterprises paid (enough to support
> everybody).
>
> There may be "keys" or accounts at some point to prevent abuse.
>
> However the plugin and API are designed to be pretty easy to recreate,
> so if someone wanted to run their own spam service they could easily.
>
> --
> Matt Mullenweg
>   http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
> http://pingomatic.com | http://cnet.com
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