For a good stretch, my intrepid sysadmin Scot had fought off the robotic legions of pagerank-sucking comment zombies, but they have scaled his javascript embattlements, and we are furiously falling back to fight another day. Bear with us as we figure out next steps…
Comment Spam
For a good stretch, my intrepid sysadmin Scot had fought off the robotic legions of pagerank-sucking comment zombies, but they have scaled his javascript embattlements, and we are furiously falling back to fight another day. Bear with us as we figure out next steps……
Just like in the days before Google when people didn’t understand that links to and from sites were the foundation of one of the most successful business ideas ever, people don’t get comments either. Hardly any one leaves comments, in my opinions, even on good blogs like this one which could use more of them. Why don’t people leave comments? There’s very little incentive to do so. Imagine that comments could be searched, however, across the blogosphere. Whenever you left a comment behind somewhere, you would be creating a defacto blog. That would encourage people to leave behind comments to other people’s blogs, and that would be very interesting indeed. By searching a particular person’s comments, you would also be pushed out in to the blogosphere and encounter blogs which you not ordinarily run in to. That would make blogging far more intresting than it currently is.
I sympathise. I originally allowed any comments, then I moved to a captcha process and that worked fine for a while. However, the final straw for me came when I posted a weblog about the death of my mother and a company spammed it with adverts for viagra. I’ve now moved to full moderation.
Some interesting theory about comments around at the moment and how turning them off can increase the sites link popularity.
http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/2006/02/turn_off_commen.html
Personally I like responding. Why don’t you just have a preffered list of commenters who can post direct, and everything else goes through review?
How about WordPress’ Akismet? Most wordpress-ers running it seem to be quite happy with it.
I fully agree that comments need to be moderated, but it takes away from the freedom of writing what you choose and engaging others in this blog-like dialogue. Maybe push or encourage people to become better engaged in topics by forcing them to login as you do here.
Try a captcha and a trust system… After n moderated posts you become trusted enough to bypass the moderation.
At Email Battles, we occasionally get surges of comments when a subject arouses enough passion. At one point, we thought we would have to go to a graphic barrier; but, since we added a simple math problem, we have had zero comment spam probs. Others have had decent results with easy sentence completion.I’ll tell you what we find slightly irritating… A lot of folks come to us through links from other sites, read our articles, then return to the referrer and yak their heads off. We need to do a better job of making them feel at home on our site.Beyond that, we email-oriented guys are upset that the rest of you have stolen our term, spam. It’s ours. We stole it fair and square.
Is a “simple math problem” preferable to a “graphic barrier” because of decreased server processing requirements?