Why Do Comment Spammers Hate BTs
Posted on | December 12, 2006 | By David and Mark | 6 Comments
As the blog has grown in popularity over the past six months or so, the comment spammers have taken notice. For those of you that are unaware, comments spammers flood blog comment sections in the hopes that you’ll click on their link and improve their Google page ranking.
In order to keep the overwhelming majority of this spam from actually hitting the blog for public consumption, we employ a fairly strong filtering mechanism. On a given day, we filter and delete literally hundreds of spam comments.
Unfortunately, the filter will catch many, many non-spam comments as well. When this happens, the comment will most likely be placed in a moderation queue and will be approved and posted within the hour (yes, we have no lives).
Recently we had certain words cause a comment or two to disappear into the vast infinity of hyperspace, never to be heard from again and some of you emailed us. We’ve removed those triggers, so the worst that will happen to your comment is that it will go into moderation.
We are investigating other means of addressing the spam problem. In the meantime, if your comment does not appear immediately, please be assured that we are not moderating comments and we have not “banned” you from commenting. In life, striking the balance between keeping out the “bad” while letting in the “good” is no simple task. The same goes for filtering out the spam while allowing your comments to be freely posted. Bear with us and, please, keep on commenting!
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December 12th, 2006 @ 4:14 pm
Cross-Currents has marked me as spam in the past–I guess they had the same problem too.
December 12th, 2006 @ 6:32 pm
Have you thought about using some kind of CAPTCHA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) ?
It can be highly effective.
There are other methods, but you will probably have to do some programming to implement them.
all the best
December 12th, 2006 @ 8:30 pm
A CAPTCHA slows down the commenting process and I think may discourage people from commenting.
December 12th, 2006 @ 11:56 pm
Better safe than sorry. When your comment is held up for moderator attention, imagine that the moderators wanted the first crack at reading such great stuff.
December 13th, 2006 @ 8:44 am
David and Mark, thanks for making the effort to keep BeyondBT as spamless as possible, while allowing as much discussion to continue as possible. It seems that any respectable blog/forum has a constant struggle to keep the spammers out. :-(
December 17th, 2006 @ 12:08 pm
Blogspot software allows image test before you can post comment, i.e. what do you see in this box. That pretty much gets rid of the spammers.