I’m more than a little glad as to how I set up comments, in that the poster has to have an approved comment before comments get posted without being moderated first.
Why?
SO MUCH SPAM. In the last two or three weeks, I’m getting 5+ spam comments a day on a variety of posts. Sure, that’s nothing for most people, probably, but it’s driving me batty. At least it’s all being captured in the moderation queue and much of it is automatically marked spam by some of the options I’ve got here in WordPress, but good grief. All kinds of spam, gold sellers, levelling guides, all that stuff.
Pro tip: Do not tell me that my blog is a thing of beauty when the post you commented on was essentially me bitching about stuff.
Seriously, the latest:
“I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful …”
Naturally, all these commenters have URLs linked to their names to promote their skeevy websites, which is an additional tip-off. :P
Fellow bloggers, how do you deal with spam?
Changing your comments so people behind proxies cannot post means I cannot post from work, I imagine this is probably the same for a liot of folks :(
Honestly, I’m surprised you haven’t marked my comments as spam yet. I don’t shut up.
Typically, if/when I would get spam on my blogs (which was rare, it’s a bad sign when even spam bots won’t visit you) I would just manually delete them. I’m guessing it’s not that easy to keep up on with a blog of this size (or larger).
You stole my “first” comment. :(
((SEE? I did it again!))
If I had a blog, which I don’t, here’s how I would handle spam: I’d mix it up in a bowl with some mustard and maybe a little bit of ketchup, fry it, and put it on a sandwich with lettuce and tomato.
Maybe this is why I don’t have a blog. ;^)
I use Disqus which has some nice filters (but IntenseDebate has similar). You can do what you do (make sure that you’ve approved someone once to allow future comments) – but with enhanced functionality. For example, if you’ve allowed someone’s post once but you’re just not “sure” of what he might post in the future, you can make sure that person’s posts are always moderated. Or you can moderate everyone except people who are whitelisted. Or put anyone in a moderation queue that provides a link with the comment.
Right now I’m moderating all, but I can approve and respond to comments from my e-mail, so they never take long to get posted. I might change my settings at some point, or add some whitelisted users…
I’ve never gotten any spam. I feel left out.
Beruthiel – I made that change in the last week or so, actually. Have you noticed that you’ve been unable to comment while at work? For that matter, hey anyone who reads at work, comment at home if you’re having trouble posting from work and I’ll re-enable it.
X – it’s not that I even have to delete them, it’s that it’s annoying to have to wade through and go “hey! New commenter!! … spam. Crap.” This is definitely not a huge blog by any means. Google Analytics tells me I get *about* 100 actual visits a day on average, but many of them are just one-page viewers (average is 1.78 pages per visit) and they’re off again. That said, I’d like to think I’ve got people reading me in RSS readers and stuff who don’t actually visit (although I think my site is nice looking!) and thus don’t get counted.
In the last month, 1,271 unique visitors, 2926 visits and 5,214 pageviews. So I’d consider that kind of small-time and all, but it’s still kind of nice to see about 100 visits a day. Although, having looked at my spam filter, I bet half of those visits are spammers trying to comment on things. :P
Ag – ahaha, good plan! ;)
zelmaru/Cranky – Hm. There’s probably a wordpress option or plugin that has a whitelist or other options you mentioned. Thanks for the idea! :)
Jasyla – ah, but you’re on blogspot and since Blogger was pretty much The Blogging Platform, back when blogs were still called “web logs”, I imagine their spam prevention is pretty good. I think you need to use a captcha, right? (The funny symbols/letters/etc to prove you’re a human.) Don’t feel left out. Feel like you’re with the pros who are awesome.
(Sidenote: I once bought two Blogger t-shirts back in the day to help in their fundraising efforts to buy new servers. Sadly, I lost the shirt somewhere between the post office and home, without realizing it. I think I probably got into the car and the shirt fell to the ground as I was getting in/before the door closed. I never got to wear it, but I’ve loved Blogger since day 1.)
Very simple, Kurn … I’m not popular enough to appear on these peoples radar. No spam, no problem :)
Great post! I love your writing and I’ll keep coming back. You’ve really opened my mind and made me thought about things differently.
Cass719249@pokerforfree.com
Oh my. I’m not sure if this comment will even get through! I’m eternally grateful that WordPress has smart plugins to detect spam. Lath and I have never really been bothered by it. Only one got through – a smart bot that duplicated someone else’s comment and stuck their link in with a different name. Fortunately the comment was uniquely written and I spotted that it was a duplicate the same day it was posted, and trashed it.
ps. good luck finding an addon/widget to help you – I’m sure there are good ones out there!
Cassandri – It went into my pending section because I hadn’t yet had an approved comment from you, so I just had to approve it and the others you posted. :)
It’s not that spam is getting through to the website, it just seems like I’m getting an awful lot stuck in my pending area. I haven’t spent a lot of time looking yet, but I did make sure Akismet was active, I have WP-SpamFree I think it’s called and added Bad Behavior as well. All three working together seems to have made a small difference, at least!