Blogspot is hurting America

Blogspot is currently broken. While it always aimed to be the place to get a free weblog, it has been the subject of various exploits and gaming.

Case in point: yesterday I got a porn spam that slipped through since the from: line was set to my own email, and amid the garbage text was a URL on blogspot. This URL:
http://trampling-high-heels3169.blogspot.com/

If you go there and check it out, it pretty much as the exact same text as the spam, but the URL leads to the spammer's real target site.

A friend recently returned from a anti-spam conference and said someone gave a demo of a spamming tool. They showed how it grabbed a zillion email addresses from a database, started churning out the email while hopping from one free open proxy server to another, and one curious last step was to automatically create a new blogger account, create a new site on blogspot, and load the email text from the spam as an entry. The last step was to raise the search engine position for the spammer's site and message and was completely automated.

When folks are using a blog host for spam and it becomes a key feature of automated spamming tools, I think it's time to fix it.

How about adding a captcha at the very least, to thwart those doing automatic script-based spaming of blogspot?