Lorelle Declares: I’m Winning the Battle Against Comment Spam
by David Peralty on November 10th, 2006 
6 Comments
If only all of us could be so fortunate. Beating back the comment spammers is not easy, but Lorelle lays out what she has and hasn’t done to push back spammers.
1. I do not use forced comment moderation.
2. I do not force people to register in order to participate on any of my blogs.
3. I do not force people to be logged in to comment.
4. I do not force visitors to dance through captchas, doing math problems, answering stupid questions, or guessing at bizarre spelled words.
5. I do monitor as much of the caught comment spam as possible for any false/positives that slip through, helping to train my comment spam fighting tools to improve comment spam recognition.
6. I do keep my blog free from comment spam, catching and removing the few that occasionally slip through as fast as I can.
7. I respect my audience.
8. I respect those who comment even more.
Now if only everyone adopted these policies, and took it upon themselves to get the latest tools in anti-spam. At least get an API key for Akismet and get that great tool running. That will take care of numerous spams. Since being activated on BloggingPro it has taken care of over 80,000 spam comments.
Let’s hear the cheer for getting everyone to sign on to the great comment spam fighting tools out there and clean up the blogosphere!
And I’m about to reach the 80,000 comment spam mark today – correction – just passed the 80,000 mark today. I just checked. Yikes!
Remember, folks, you don’t have to have a popular or A-list blog in order to get comment spam. The number of comment spams is not related to traffic. Any blog can get spammed. The key is to fight back from the start and don’t stop until comment spammers get the hint that it doesn’t work and it doesn’t pay. Maybe then they will stop.
“Since being activated on BloggingPro it has taken care of over 80,000 spam comments.”
Yes, and I sometimes take the time to sift through these for legit comments in my spare time.
Sigh. Spammers. Gotta hate ‘em!
That’s nothing. I make two claims, first that one of my blogs has accumulated 225,376 blocked spams so far, and second that I could, in a day, write a spam tool which would produce results indistinguishable from a real comment by tools like Akismet. Just because the “easy” spam problem has been solved doesn’t mean the war is anywhere near over.
@Elliot – So now if all our blogs start getting comment spam that Akismet doesn’t catch we know who to go looking for. :)
I’m so tempted to do it, except it’s bad. Sigh. The anti-spam people are so smug…
Nice story as for me. It would be great to read more about this matter.