Follow you, follow me

Venomous Kate reports:

If your immediate reaction is "What are you, nuts?" you might want to think again. "Nofollow" is just one tool, and not a very effective one: it assumes, prima facie, that spammers are rational and will not deposit their, um, calling cards on places where their Google PageRank will not be improved. I would hate to have to defend that proposition. The current spam approach is to throw everything possible against the wall, and if something sticks, so much the better.

As an experiment, last week I stripped the nofollow tags from the current database (posts since the first week of September '06) and upgraded Autoban to the current release. Spam trackbacks, which make up 95 percent of the spam received here, have dropped off markedly. I made no announcement at the time, partially because most of the behind-the-scene tweaks I make simply aren't that interesting, but mostly because if it blew up in my face I didn't want to have to come up with a mea culpa.

This isn't the first time I've abandoned an anti-spam tool, either. By default Movable Type throws in some encoding on commenter email addresses to keep them from being harvested in bulk; I figured it might be even more effective simply to keep them off the page.

As always, this should be considered a work in progress, and things are subject to change.

Update, 20 June, 8:20 pm: Is this a movement? Charity is dropping the nofollow tag from her blog.