This notice is about an Antispam Solution for Windows Live Spaces Spam Comments in test, during which period I temporarily disable public comments to my spaces. I apologize if it brings any inconvenience. If you have anything you can still leave me a message. I'll re-enable comments shortly after the test.

My Windows Live Spaces was spammed pretty badly in the previous months and especially recently. I can no longer tolerate spam comments yet I don't want to spend hours manually filtering and deleting spam comments. I have been expecting Microsoft to come up with a more sophisticated antispam solution for their Windows Live Spaces service. It is neither technically challenging nor legally disputable. I have been waiting for long and Microsoft is letting me down. So far a Google search on "Windows Live Spaces spam comments" yield no useful solutions for me to leverage. Certain companies might be in negotiation with Microsoft to deploy antispam solutions at server side but even if there are efforts toward that direction the whole process may be very time consuming and I can no longer wait. So I came up with an automated spam comments filtering & batch deletion solution myself.

This is how it works: it requires you to sign into your Live Spaces first (otherwise the program won't have permission to delete comments), and then it will retrieve http://yourspaces.mobile.spaces.live.com, and enumerate all comments on that page (not many, probably only 7 as I tried out on my own spaces). For any comments containing 3 or more links, it is considered potentially spam and will be marked as "to be deleted" in the result page. You can toggle the checkbox to manually override the choice when the result page is presented. Then you can click "delete selected comments" to delete all those spam comments at once.

Then the program will retrieve the http://yourspaces.mobile.spaces.live.com page again and automatically delete all comments similar to the marked ones (that means similar post time, almost identical text content and identical links). This process is repeated (so more comments will show up on that page as the more recent ones get deleted) until the program finds no more "100% sure" spam comments. Then it will present a list of comments (with those potential spam comments marked as "to be deleted" in the new result page, and allow the users to choose to proceed with batch deletion, or done with the operation.

Some technical details: the program parses the comments text and urls from the mobile.spaces.live.com page, and follows the "delete comment" link to get the content of the confirmation page, and then parses the confirmation page to get the http POST request from the "delete comment" button, and post the request to the server.

At the moment I temporarily disabled visitors commenting while I'm testing this solution out and cleaning up my own Live Spaces. Please expect I re-enabling visitors comments shortly. I may post a link to this antispam solution when the test and cleanup is done if it is proven usable and reliable.