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Tuesday, January 01, 2013

A Newer Commenting Policy

Suffering under a deluge of spam, I had changed my commenting policy to require you to type in those horrid  captcha words. I didn't want to do it, but there seemed to be no alternative. This morning, I went through the spam comments on the site and found a few things.
  • Up until the middle of November, Blogger's spam catcher worked well. Why it fell apart then, I'm not sure, but up to that point, it was working fine.
  • Spam comments come mostly on old posts.
  • Blogger settings allow you to use comment moderation on posts older than a given age.
I've turned the captcha words off again and am using comment moderation on any post older than 7 days. I don't want my email larded up with the stuff, so I won't review comments on those older posts until I get around to looking at them in the Blogger dashboard. I'll try to be better about looking at them in a more timely manner, but I'm not able to make any promises.

Settings -> Comments
If some of your comments got caught in the spam filter, I'm sorry, but I'm just killing everything there. As I understand it, Blogger's spam filter is based on the spam comments you delete, not the ones simply marked spam. I've got more than 47,000 spam comments and there's no way I can go through each of them looking for your work. I'm flushing the whole thing without reading them.

I love comments. I love them more than hits. I want to make it as easy as possible for you to interact here on the 'Post. I'm hoping these new settings will help kill off spam while making the effort to comment as light as possible.
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4 comments:

  1. Tim Eisele3:31 AM

    Spamming of comments has gotten ludicrous. I was offline for a week, and when I got back home and checked, my spam filter had caught 1300 new spams (bringing the total number caught since I started using it up to 105,000).

    I don't know if the spam numbers are so high because the spammers are successful, or if it is because it is such a marginal business that they have to resort to saturation-bombing every blog in existence just to break even. I hope it is the latter, though, because in that case the whole thing should collapse eventually.

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  2. Unknown4:09 AM

    I think Tim might be right about the desperation of the spammers and saturation bombing! everyone on the web is wise to their games by now!

    It is always a shame to have to use CAPTCHA though. I really loathe the things to the point where I started usng CAPTCHA bypass software called RUMOLA to read and fill the things in for me. When you love to blog typing in about 50 of these a day is no fun at all!

    Can you use some of the "fun" CAPTCHAs on blogger? They are a good idea!

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  3. Mostly Nothing5:24 AM

    7 days seems a long time. I look back and rarely see another comment after the first couple days.

    I read the blogs I read everyday.

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  4. K T Cat6:06 AM

    Thanks for the feedback! I'm getting more than 100 spam comments a day, but the new policy seems to be working well.

    MN, the spammers love to hit older posts. I think that's because blog admins typically check the recent ones the most for cleanup.

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