Blog Spam comments

When I ceased posting to my blogs back in August, I left commenting enabled and even permitted anonymous commenting. That was fine for several weeks, but gradually in September I began to get more and more blog spam comments. Since I have email notification turned on for comments, this blog spam ended up in my email inbox. I left things as they were as an experiment to see how blog spamming evolved. Some days I'd only receive a couple of spam comments, other days upwards of half a dozen, sometimes a dozen, and occasionally as many as 18 spam comments in one day.

Today, I decided that I had had enough and that the experiment wasn't yielding any new and interesting results. So, I decided to disable anonymous comments.

I logged into Blogger and was about to change the comment setting from "Anyone" to "Only Registered Users", but then I noticed that Blogger had some new settings since I last used it in August. In particular, they now have "word verification" so that spam "bots" can be kept at bay, and that seemed to cover virtually all of the spam comments I was receiving. So, I turned on word verification, but kept the other setting so that anybody (but mindless bots) can still comment.

I left the existing spam comments in place since they are fairly innocuous and allow people to get a sense of what spam comments can be like. I hope others gain at least a little bit of insight from my experience. I only encountered one spam comment that I felt was over the line and merited deletion.

Now let's see if I really can have my cake and eat it too.

-- Jack Krupansky