Don’t be a spammer’s paradise. But don’t annoy your readers either. I’ve been getting a WHOLE lotta spam on my blogs lately. Luckily none of it has slipped through to the publicly seen comments, but that has involved deleting it by hand, which can be a very tedious process when you’re averaging 100 spam comments a day. Not to mention that I sometimes spam a real comment in the process, and that is just a little embarrassing.
So how to get rid of or prevent spam comments on your blog? There are two methods: front-end registration or user participation or back-end plug-ins and programs.
There are several different front-end techniques for filtering comment spam, more or less palatable and intrusive to the user. The first is registration- you have to enter your name and email address. This is usually OK, as often there is the choice of staying anonymous, and the cookies in your computer can remember the information for your next visit to the site. There is also comment approval, usually a first time commenter requires the site owner’s approval of the comment before the comment is published. This too is not that intrusive and usually fairly acceptable to the user. Finally there is the word captcha, where the commenter needs to type a random series of letters or numbers before the comment is published. I intensely dislike this method, as it often takes me two or three times to get my comment through. I tolerate it only on blogs I love, and for whom I am willing to jump through the hoops, but I refuse to install this on my own blog.
Back-end solutions prevent spam without the average reader being aware of it. These are things like plug-ins or administrator privilege. Administrator privilege is the blog administrator’s ability to delete or spam comments after they have been left (but also before they are published) from the admin interface. There are also a lot of plug-ins, especially for WordPress blogs. I’ve tried anti-spam plug-ins like Askimet before, except that they are complicated to use and still require sifting and sorting through the comments, in order to catch the false positives. The other day, however, I discovered and installed a new plug-in on Almost Frugal, which so far at least, has done a remarkable job of filtering comment spam. My only critique is that you can’t go back and double check that legitimate comments aren’t getting filtered as well.
So there you have it: two techniques for keeping your blog spam free. How do you handle the problem on your own blog?
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