» On Dealing With Comment Spam >> The Retrospector

On Dealing With Comment Spam

Posted June 7th, 2006
Categories: Blogging

The last couple days I’ve been experiencing some pretty heavy comment spam on my site. Two things come to mind when I see this.

If spammers are seeing my site, then so are readers! My site must be reaching a popularity threshold that merits spammers to want to fill my site with their links! Yay!
Oh great, now I’m getting 50+ comments a day in my posts all about things I don’t even want to mention let alone have all over my comments list. It’s going to take me forever to monitor that every day.

So, there’s a good side and a bad side to comment spam as I see it. Mostly bad as far as having to deal with it, but at least it’s telling me something about my blog.

So You Have An Audience?

My first point above basically implies that I’ve got an audience at all. I know I do, be it there aren’t many. (I’ve had 1000+ visitors in a day after ending up on a couple of social bookmarking sites, but on days without an attention-getting post I have less than 100/day.) I see comments coming through from people that like and dislike what the post says, so I know there are people out there coming to my site.

If spammers come to this site to fill it with spam, they must think there are eyes on these pages to look at their spam. Yes, I’m sure it’s just some dumb crawler bot or something that found a comment page to make posts to regardless of my traffic. However, I went an entire month without seeing any spam comments like this just fine.

After having made the front page of Reddit.com I noticed some strange spam posts that I promptly removed. I’m guessing these were some kind of testing posts because they simply didn’t make sense. Within hours I was getting dozens of comments on each post that had one of those “gibberish” comments.

Now What Do I Do?

All is not lost. I know there’s millions of bloggers out there dealing with this. I may as well suck it up and deal with it too. Problogger.net has a few posts about why spam comment is dangerous and how it costs blogs in many different ways.

There has to be some kind of feature outside of the regular WordPress options where you just fill in all the words you don’t want to see show up on posts.

I’ve seen quite a few neat implementations to solve this problem:

Find a spam plugin for your blogging platform that will filter the spam for you.
Install a form field requiring users to match a character sequence from an image displayed on the page that bots can’t easily figure out how to decipher before the comment is allowed.
Custom write your own spam controlling mechanism allowing you to over time build up your own library of spam blacklist material.

Some obviously involve more work than others. Any of these is a better solution than trying to monitor all the spam yourself. I just installed the Akismet plugin for WordPress this morning in about 5 minutes and it seems to be working great already after just 20 minutes. It looks like it’s caught 7 spam messages since I installed it now.

Conclusion

At any rate, I’ve quickly been able to defer all the spam from my comments section using a plugin. (I hear there’s a 98-99% success rate using it.) It’s a small price to pay for actually having visitors on the site. I’m glad to have finally “graduated” into the visible-enough-to-have-spam blogging crowd.