Fighting the war against Blog spam
Surprisingly one of the prominent reasons why most blogs are abandoned is because it takes much more time in maintaining a clean environment to freely work in than actually writing and promoting the blog. Fortunately there are ways to effectively block spam as I will be showing later in this post.
There are tons of ways to block comment spam but for now I will only be going into three basic common ways to be on the winning side of the battle against spam.
Captcha
This is one of the most effective ways in protecting your blog against automatic comment submitters, although it might be seen as a hassle for people who’d genuinely like to comment, I’m sure they’d appreciate the clean environment. You can easily get a free captcha add-on from http://www.captcha.net/
Registration
Restricting comments only to registered members with e-mail verification has also proved to be good at fighting the war against spam. This approach should be used with caution because it would obviously reduce the volume of comments you receive just because people tend to not comment if they have to register and login every time they wish to post a comment.
Pre-moderation
A lot of blogs make use of this feature just because they’ve had enough of spam and is the most easy to implement (just a setting in most common bogging platforms). It’s the most effective way to combat spam but doesn’t really reduce the time it takes for a blogger to manage a blog since every comment has to be approved. The other problem with using the pre-moderation feature is it disallows readers to chat/argue lively unless you’re going to sit at your computer all day and night approving or denying comments.
As you might have noticed my preferred method of blocking spam is using captchas, if this isn’t good enough for you I urge you to subscribe to my RSS feed as I’ll be posting another way to manage spam without using captchas in the near future.
Hope you have fun writing for sentences, Anthony!
I just checked your website - I think it’s was a little strange that you have to request samples of your work. Each to their own I guess.
- Steven
Thanks very much for the entry Bryan, muchos appreciated!
Steven, as of March 1st 2008 this will change. I think it’s time for a new face and some new projects for Fantasy Creative. We have some big things coming, thanks for the warm welcome and the visit!
Welcome Anthony! I look forward to your contributions.
Congratulations on the promotion Anthony. I’m sure you’ll be a great asset to the website.
Good choice Bryan, blogging on your own can be hard work! Good luck to the both of you!
Can’t wait to see his articles
I dont mind capchas but sometimes they are so hard its ridiculous. If your going to use them, use good quality ones.
I’m like Tom, I don’t mind captcha’s but they always seem to be hard to read when your in a rush.
I have actually posted my method for spam on my blog. I use the Askimet plugin for Wordpress to catch the spam comments then I use the WP-Ban plugin to ban the ip’s of the spammers.
Other the last month I have almost stopped spam from been posted on my site. I just get the odd comment, 2 a week usually. My method can be seen here, always of course looking for better ways to solve the problem, so i’ll keep checking back to see your other method.
Andy
I do have to agree with tom that please use the good ones otherwise I get discouraged (not from sentences please) but from other places that use crappy capchas,
what do you mean by hard?
Pretty good article. A little different then the usual topics, but not bad. About time I saw you update Sentences though!
Great article Stefan, glad to have you on board.