Marketing_Guy - 9:49 am on Apr 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

If an instant lifetime ban was imposed on sites that were in blatant contravention of their guidelines the spammers would soon realise that this was too risky to be a good business model

Unfortunately there's no risk in getting banned because they don't lose anything. What is needed is a way of stopping them making money in the first place - that would make the business model more risky. The sandbox effect has gone some way to do this, but it's not like spammers are gonna just turn round and say "gosh darnit" and walk away! ;) They learn and adapt too! :)

I notice one of the authors of the paper is a Yahoo employee, and doesn't this mesh nicely with Yahoo's patent document referring to "concept networks"?

Scott