I just thought I should mention that because of the ever-escalating amount of comment spam I’m getting on plasticbag.org nowadays, I’ve decided to make it the default behaviour to not publish them immediately on the site. If you’re a Typekey user, then you get a free pass – your comments will appear on the site immediately – but otherwise I’m afraid every single comment is going to get individually checked by me before it goes up. I’d really rather this wasn’t the case for a whole bunch of reasons (including my possible increased liability to legal threat) but I’m not comfortable any more having mother/daughter incest, bestiality and teen slut links on my site as a matter of course. So I’m cutting them off. It’ll mean a bit more work for me, and a less dynamic and exciting site, but I can’t really think of another solution that doesn’t end up being an ever-escalating arms race. You can read my earlier thoughts around this territory in this old post of mine: Trackback is Dead – Are Comments Dead Too?
Categories
8 replies on “A quick note on comments…”
What about visual authentication? It’s a bit boring for the poster, but better than total moderation. Doesn’t Typekey have anything built in? WordPress has Akismet which works just fine – and goes unnoticed by genuine commenters…
I had this problem on my website, so I wrote some script that checks the contents of the comments, and if it contained 2 or more words that I have defined as being dodgy, then it was automatically flagged as spam. Otherwise the comment is emailed to me for approval before posting. I would like to set up a level of trust were if your email address used to post a comment has been approved before, then you are deemed safe, and therefore do not need your comments approved, but are still forwards to me just to double check. A job for the weekend I think!
Tom, do keep us updated on how this goes. I’ve been on the verge of requiring TypeKey authentication (and not allowing anything else because I won’t get round to approving things manually) over the past couple of weeks. But I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Yet.
I’d be interested too. For posterity. 🙂
For a loooong time I never had to deal with SPAM on my site. I imagine mostly since I wrote the whole backend myself. Originally I just added in a check and unless specified a post’s comment form would disappear after a couple months. But about a month ago my cowriter noticed some weird comment SPAM as if someone was testing a method to automate the SPAM. Low and behold a couple weeks ago we started getting a bunch of junk comments every few hours…
So what I did was (and this cut into my actual time rewriting other stuff that’s broken) write into the comment form a hash that gets passed over when the form is submitted. If that field isn’t submitted, or it’s content (the hash) does not match up then the comment is rejected. Testing went OK, but we’ll see if any bugs come up. 😉
Good luck combating the spammers Tom!
I’d be interested too. For posterity. 🙂
For a loooong time I never had to deal with SPAM on my site. I imagine mostly since I wrote the whole backend myself. Originally I just added in a check and unless specified a post’s comment form would disappear after a couple months. But about a month ago my cowriter noticed some weird comment SPAM as if someone was testing a method to automate the SPAM. Low and behold a couple weeks ago we started getting a bunch of junk comments every few hours…
So what I did was (and this cut into my actual time rewriting other stuff that’s broken) write into the comment form a hash that gets passed over when the form is submitted. If that field isn’t submitted, or it’s content (the hash) does not match up then the comment is rejected. Testing went OK, but we’ll see if any bugs come up. 😉
Good luck combating the spammers Tom!
Have you tried Akisimet, Tom?
I was doing the TypeKey login/comment-by-comment moderation thing for a good while, but installed Akismet and opened up comments completely a month ago and have had precisely one spam comment slip through since (out of 100 to 150 attempts per day).
I’m also going to recommend Akisimet.
I activated the built-in version in WordPress and the result was stunning. I haven’t yet had a piece of spam get through (5 weeks since install).
Do give it a try, it will remove the moderation headaches and keep the place spam free 🙂
Of course, now I wonder if such a recommendation is in itself spam!
I was just about to say Akismet as well, you should give it a go.