This just in from the man who brought us .TEXT (which I would love to use..but alas no SQL). "Blog spam has to go."

Scott. You're right no solution will be perfect. A thought I had would be validating the email address used to post a comment making sure it's a real email...then I actually came to your blog to post a comment and saw that there isn't an email address field. (then my comment got too long and so I decided to just trackback it anyway). That one is out as a fix-all, but could be in as part of the solution. Obviously it wouldn't catch everything, but as with security, this will probably end up being a multi-layered/multi-tiered solution.

Christian, I think your idea is good and maybe heading in the right direction toward another layer of the solution, but the downside would be that the valid comments, like yours, won't get the benefit of the link being there. The benefit being google ranking, Technorati indexing or whatever else. And the linking/ranking thing isn't necessarily about popularity as much as it is about creating that expanding decentralized but networked thing that we call the blogosphere (via Scoble from Shel). Additionally, the internals of the blog engines would have to be changed so that people could still click on your comment and go to your blog through their aggregators, and all of those sites that do blog indexing would have to change as well. This is going to have to be a community driven change I'm sure, and we should all work together on it, but I think that is going to make it hard for there to be drastic changes.

I think the question to be answered first is "how is the comment spam being generated?". That is, by what means does the spammer put in the comment? Once that is known, then you could take specific steps. If the comments are being automated somehow, you could implement something like having some verification to put in a comment, like the old random image number trick, or a "blog key" (BKI - Blog Key Infrastructure?) that is randomly generated on the blog, not always between the same tags, that you would have to copy and paste into the comment section. Basically what we would need is something that hinders automation.

However, like email spam, usenet spam, telephone spam that has come before...stopping comment spam may be an effort worthy of Sisyphus. Not that I think that we shouldn't at least give it the old Blogosphere try.