Invites require an e-mail address or something, would be a bit troublesome for newcomers/loners on the Internet, and seem more easily abused. Does that sound fair enough? In general, I don’t like a centralized /hardly anything/. For one, it provides a single point of failure. For two, it gives that point an awful lot of power. (An awful lot of power corrupts…awful lotly?) I’m not opposed to an identification system, although it needs to be an anonymous identification system for those under, shall we say, “overdeveloped” national governments. OpenID seems like a neat [decentralized] system, if it proves robust it sounds helpful.

Microtariffs would still be necessary with an ID system to avoid needing to blacklist users. If the Internet is just an information access system, its a privilege that can be taken away. But it’s an extreme thing for a country to deport or, uh, “delete” its citizens, and I think that’s more what a blacklist would feel like. I’m interested in trying a free economic solution first. Capitalism has its issues. However, human greed has been shown to produce better economic results under capitalism than, say, communism with a large dose of centralized control.

Yet no apology necessary at all. It’s interesting and hopefully helpful in the long run to discuss the pros and cons of a number of options. I just wanted to hear some feedback on this idea too, and yours was helpful! You bring up some good points. I do think the blog plugin would be very practical — certainly no harder to install, and potentially much easier to configure, than SpamKarma. And for users of Blogger, Myspace, Xanga, whatever, etc. there wouldn’t be any installation hassle, and I would assume that the revenue would be split however any ad revenue is split now.

Like you say, this plan would definitely need to cover more options than just blogs. Forum posts are probably the second easiest, although I didn’t realize just how prolific some posters can be. I suppose you’d have to adjust the “economics” appropriately: things like lower fees in general (1/10 of a cent times a hundred posts is still only a fraction of a soda/snack per day); bulk/amortized discounts; maybe even giving back credit for helpful posts.

You’ve got a great counterexample in wikis, I’d agree that that would be a stretch. The best I can think of is that spam/vandalism posters are charged k*x per edited word, and edits that are accepted get only a 1*x credit per word. But this would be just as much work for the moderators/community and when spam did decrease, the ‘k’ factor would have to increase proportionally to the point where somebody who had a change rejected as “vandalism” unfairly (say in the course of an NPOV dispute) would risk a significant fee. (Credit systems in such an open-ended environment would also risk abuse.) Maybe the kind of clever and zany thinking that made wikis successful could also find a more creative way to make microtariffs successful in that context. Then again, a simple red/yellow/green statistical relevance flag might be just enough help from the machine to allow the community’s “self-moderating” strategy to continue, at least on the more popular wikis.

Like you said, I’d love to see a few forums or a blogging platform try this out. The whole multilayered account ecosystem would need some critical mass before the ideal ease of use (and ubiquitousness) began to shine. It might be best to try it with wooden nickels before expecting the users to break out their credit cards for just one site! This is an economic/people problem, and I don’t have a lot of experience predicting, modeling or encouraging those kinds of solutions. Hopefully, having the idea out there will at worst only result in the flaws being exposed, and at best lead to something better for the Internet/Web before some patent troll or big bureaucracy ends up calling the shots.

Although it is an interesting idea, I’m afraid it’s mostly impractical. You can’t expect every blogger to install this plugin by herself, and if you’re talking about one or more central services, how would they share the revenue? If each comment costs 2¢, do you split it 50/50?

Then, link spam isn’t strictly blog-specific. Would you charge for each wiki edit? How about forum posts? I know a few users who regularly post a hundred times a day. Would they still be users once they have to literally invest $$$?

This could still be considered a potential solution for very large bulletin boards. I’d suggest those to have one forum singled out first to see if this works.

Spamper, on the other hand, could be deployed immediately on every board/blog/wiki/site out there…

Those are my 2¢.

The phpBB MOD automatically detects spam links (and successfully filters them). However, as I already noted, this isn’t about just filtering spam any more (which is gradually circumvented on every possible level), this is about stopping it altogether.

Plus, you still have the problem of deciding whether it’s spam or not. If you can do that, you can just filter it, right?