Saturday 30 March 2013

Dealing with Sodding Spam

Like that alliteration eh?

OK, so I hate, hate, hate having to type in numbers and words that are so squashed together I can barely figure out what they are, and until recently I've always though "Oh come on, how much spam can one blogger get?" To be fair to Blogger, enough of it has been caught and sent to the naughty file to await deletion with a swift click from me. But of late, every other comment is from someone a) failing to recognise that I, and most of my readers, don't actually speak Hindi, and/or b) writing such terrible prose that even if it were relevant, it's immediately deleted.

So - what to do? The blogger word verification system is really irritating to me; I don't want my readers to have to make five attempts to leave a comment, because they just won't. They'll bog off to find a blogger who doesn't make then jump through hoops just to respond.

On the other hand, I don't want to make someone "sign up" to something either. I mean, we all have enough log-ins and passwords to deal with don't we?

Any suggestions pals? Or shall I just keep checking the comments and leaping in with my administrative delete powers every now and then?

8 comments:

  1. I champion Disqus. It has a guest (no sign up required) option too. Using Disqus I get about 4 spam email per month and I'd say they are almost always caught by the moderation facility so I just delete them from the Disqus dashboard.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm having trouble with spam too, but with Disqus, not Blogger. I switched to Disqus on a couple of my blogs and have two or three spam comments a day, sometimes more. They are never published on the blog, but I still get email alerts and have to delete them. I suppose it varies from site to site, and which spammers decide to target you.

    -Abigail
    ww.PictureBritain.com

    ReplyDelete
  3. Do whatever you have to do (oh please, please not word verification!) and I will still attempt to comment.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Spam seems to come in waves on my blog, i'll have a tonne for a week or so and then it'll cool off. At the moment I still use the blogger comment system (I tried disquis once and lost all my old comments) so I have comment moderation on them - i'm not really into those crazy word verification puzzles! I always try to contact blogger about the issue but they never get back in touch.

    ReplyDelete
  5. It's a real pain - and if you find an answer, can you let me know? (I appreciate, you may not want to use my comment box to do so since I HAVE installed the blogger captcha tool - but as I think you know, I was having to delete between 50 & 100 spam comments a day and it finally got too much...)

    ReplyDelete
  6. We use akisnet on wordpress. Speaking of which, are you ever going tom change over? Or are you blogger through and through?

    ReplyDelete
  7. Looking forward to having you share what you learn. I have been having so much trouble with spam that I started moderating comments again but am reluctant to use word verification. The anonymous ones don't bother me as much because they are at least straightforward spam. What I really hate are the ones that have a semilegitimate name and a comment that sort of pretends to have read your post, "This truly handles the subject in a meaningful way, better than any other on this subject and I will surely be adding to my reader. Feel free to visit my blog as well! freeviagra.com" Grrrrr. I would just like to know if anyone, anywhere, ever actually goes to any of those sites. They must, or the spammers wouldn't bother..right?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Askimet on Wordpress is great, I get so much spam and it blocks 99% of it, however occasionally it block the odd genuine comment and I only find out the person commenting flags it with me.

    ReplyDelete

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