Comments on: Comment Spam and Search

By: Radoslaw Cz.

Radoslaw Cz. — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 19:59:52 +0000

Hey, nice article.

Feel free to check my disaster recovery blog.

By: Carmi Levy

Carmi Levy — Tue, 05 Jul 2005 02:26:29 +0000

Sounds like a reasonable suggestion. It saddens me that automated processes like comment spam once again threaten to snuff out an innovative form of online exchange.

I suspect the 80% of blog owners who are not yet fully versed in fighting comment spam would be open to some coaching on the fine art of being more proactive.

Like anti-virus, anti-malware, and all other anti-bad-stuff issues that have come before, collective efforts to mitigate the threat are enhanced when the majority of end-users comes on board.

The challenge I see lies in getting that expertise, the lowdown on best practices, into the hands of the average joes and josephinas out there who are currently oblivious. More than anything, it's a communications nightmare. But it has to happen, otherwise the scum who threaten to ruin it for the rest of us will ultimately prevail.

By: Anil

Anil — Wed, 22 Dec 2004 19:15:35 +0000

Peatey, for what it's worth, the reason that many Blogger sites don't have comment spam is because they require authentication to comment. You can do the same by enabling TypeKey on a Movable Type blog. On TypePad, I believe we catch over 95% of comment spam and automatically delete it. Google's got a pretty good policy about not giving special treatment to Blogger sites. In addition. Movable Type has had redirects in comment links for over a year, but that fact doesn't generally stop spammers.

If you want more specific information, please feel free to get in touch.

John, we're going to be talking a lot more about the various tactics out there today, along with some pros and cons of each tactic. We've put a lot of thought into this, and with TypePad we probably have the largest base of comment-enabled blogs that don't use authentication by default for commenters. That's given us a lot of raw data to look at, and we'll be sharing some of those insights as well.

By: Andy Beal

Andy Beal — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 14:21:30 +0000

I accidently discovered the answer when I launched my blog. Haloscan.com provides third-party comment applet that uses javascript to launch and is hosted with Haloscan.

With these two elements, it makes it hard for robots to paste comment spam and there is no PageRank leak.

By: Peatey

Peatey — Tue, 21 Dec 2004 01:14:47 +0000

Howdy, I'm switching from MT/TypePad to Blogger because of this (and the fact that it's free hosting). Blogger, because of its alliance with Google, has an advantage in the solution.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=808&query=redirect%20link&topic=0&type=f

By: Jackson West

Jackson West — Mon, 20 Dec 2004 23:55:00 +0000

Being relatively new to both having a blog that has a high pagerank and is powered by moveable type, when we got our first comment spam I started to freak. I'd delete a comment only to see three pop up in its place.

We ended up getting gothamist.com's backlog of banned links generated from the MT Blacklist plugin. When we upgraded to 3.1, the 'de-spam' link for comments was included in comment notification emails. Since each of my contribs is essentially responsible for monitoring their own comments, this took an incredibly amount of workload off me personally as the editor and distributed it relatively evenly among all the staff, with no training on my part.

Get a spam comment? Click the de-spam link, the MT Blacklist page comes up, click 'Do My bidding,' and boom, ch3ap v!@gr@ and t3*@s h0ld '3m links are no more. On top of that, comments with links won't even appear on the site until I approve them or they are entered by a typekey user. We haven't had a bit of spam on our public site in months.