If you have a blog, then you are probably familiar with spam. People will comment on your site for the sole reason of promoting their own blogs. They do not read your posts, they just comment, asking you to sign up for their new pharmaceutical website. Not only is it annoying, but it can also take away from other useful comments. It can also destroy debates and conversations that have been sparked by your post. If you want to know how to get rid of blog comment spam, here are a few tips that can help you.
Many people automatically approve of blog comments. This is a setting on most blogging platforms that will allow anyone to post on your site. This does save time, because you do not have to personally approve of your comments, but it will lead to more spamming. If you are having a blog comment spam problem, you should consider manually approving of all of the comments that go under your posts.
There are also programs that you can use to help eliminate spam. For instance, when you start a WordPress blog, you will automatically be able to enable a program called Akismet. This program is designed to block blog comment spam. But it is not perfect, and it will need your help to learn. If you discover that a spam comment has come through, do not just delete it. If you mark it as spam, Akismet will learn not to let similar comments through.
One final option to help you regain control of your blog posts, is to only allow comments from registered users. You can do this at two different levels. You can block all people who are not registered to your blogging platform. Or you can block comments from all people who are not registered to your specific blog.
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I agree with you. I do the same. Thanks for your comment and I hope this finds you well.keep it up.
How ironic and cute that you came to leave a spam comment here.
Not only does manually approving comments take time, but it isn’t a solution that scales well if your blog becomes popular, which is the goal, of course. But your blog probably will not become popular if you manually moderate comments. Everyone hates writing a comment never to see it posted.
Akismet doesn’t work well, especially for human generated comment spam, that’s why comment spam is still a problem.
Blocking anonymous users will reduce your total amount of comments as well as deter the best comments, since people are reluctant to be associated with controversial opinions for fear of backlash.
For a solution to WordPress comment spam, check out the SiteBrains plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sitebrains-1/ and all other platforms can get started at http://www.SiteBrains.com – a real-time comment moderation system that let’s your users post without waiting and manual moderation required.
Thanks for letting us know about your plugin Jonathan.
Most new blogs get a ton of automated and human generated comment spam. Our preference is to manually moderate until the volume of quality comments increases to the point that moderation becomes too time consuming. Having your site get so popular that you can’t effectively manage the comments and user participation seems like an awesome problem to have.
Yes, an awesome problem to have indeed. Evidently you are a vigilant moderator but most aren’t!
So you aren’t using anything except manual moderation? At one community I worked at, we would receive 50K bot generated spam comments per day or roughly 10x our legitimate comments. Wading through that would have been impossible.
If you ever need help, don’t hesitate to call on me. Our plugin is current free to Beta users.