How do you deal with spam?
If you publish a blog, even a personal one, I’m sure that you’ve already received comments unrelated to the contents of your blog. Most of the time, these unsolicited messages are sent to you to promote such things as gambling, sex or drugs. In a recent article, “Blogosphere suffers spam explosion,” CNET News.com described the problem.
For example, Boing Boing, a blog which attracts 400,000 visitors daily, has totally banned comments for two years. And even if it’s an extreme attitude, what can you do when you receive 20 or 100 spam messages every day?
Here is a short description of what you can do depending on your blog publishing tool features.
- Accept all comments, but there is a risk: the ‘bots’ — or software robots — used to post spam messages often target old pages that you are not reading; and their messages might be illegal depending on where you live.
- Rely on the spam filters provided by you blogging platform, but you’re not sure if these filters are efficient.
- Establish ‘blacklists’ of people or IP addresses you want to ban; alternatively, you can build ‘whitelists’ of people from which you accept comments.
- Moderate comments and review them for approval before publication.
- Ask commenters to identify themselves via valid names and e-mail addresses: unfortunately, it’s easy to forge an a valid address for miscreants; and valid commenters might not like the idea to give you their identity or simply to spend some extra time just to tell you what they think.
- Ask your visitors to use passwords or ‘pass-strings’: this can be efficient to keep ‘bots’ at bay, but it might be a pain for people who would just want to send you a useful feedback.
- Reject all comments: this is an extreme measure, but it might be the only solution with some blogging tools.
In my four years of blogging, I’ve used all of these techniques at a moment or another. None of them is fully satisfactory. Some take lots of time while others don’t really encourage conversations.
So what kind of tool do you use to deal with spam? Send me your thoughts.
