We Need: A Spam Detecting Web Service

Someone, perhaps Google, should make a web service that rates pure text and gives it a spam score.

Most webmasters are inundated with spam. It can be sent via email (the traditional method) or by a form. Form spam is commonly seen in blog comments, forum posts, and any other type of form you can think of (ex. a join our site form).

Using a similar algorithm to that which is used to detect email spam, one should be able to have a service that would take a text and an IP address, and output a spam score.

Google would be well qualified to do this because they have a spam detector for Gmail, and they like sponsoring this type of project.

This would produce an arms race with the spammers, but the collective effort of thousands of webmasters could help us stay significantly ahead of the spammers. With the anti-spam web service, webmasters could share their form spam submissions and by learning for a vast database of form spam it should be easy to detect patterns.