One of the major problems in managing a weblog, or any site where visitors can leave comments, is that there are some that abuse the open nature of the web in order to advertise either unsavoury goods or copied software. These are the spammers. Their ploy is to insert their url into as thousands of sites in order to achieve a high search engine rating.

Their are various solutions to this, none of them entirely effective, but I found an interesting discussion on the alternatives at Sitepoint.

The danger in all this, as in any community that includes those that abuse freedom, is that the security measures we find necessary start to undermine the very freedoms we wish to preserve. This is where measures taken at the individual level are inadequate. We also need action at government level to put web abusers out of business.