The commenting system I use is a free one from Haloscan. It’s pretty common and it’s free, although its anything but full-featured in its basic form. Only occasionally do I ever get comment spam on it, which is companies that are trying to artificially build like popularity by putting in words like “online poker” or “viagra” or “discount cigarettes” and shit like that into your space where normally real humans would comment. I guess people who use other commenting systems tend to get blasted by this kind of stuff though, like Movable Type is a big target. Any commenting system that saves the comments right into the actual HTML code of the site. Mine doesn’t do that, and that’s why I don’t get hit I think.

In any event, Google has developed an initiative to fight against comment spam and it seems like a halfway decent idea. A bunch of other companies have decided to back it as well. Basically, once it’s adopted into common usage, you won’t have to do anything. But the blogging software applications will add in a bit of code, rel=”nofollow” into any link that a visitor leaves in a comment box. Links with this code will not be spidered nor will they calculated in Google’s PageRank system. Before this, you could put in an option on your HTML header that prevented your page from being spidered, but this is the first item-level one that I’ve heard of. Eventually they’re hoping it will get adopted into things like message boards as well, which are another big target.