Have you ever wonder why I ask for login credentials for comments? Have you wondered why your comment does not immediately show up? The answer is due to spam comments and trackbacks. With junk mail filters getting pretty good, blogs have become the target of spammers. To give you an idea of how bad it has become I have gotten 40 bogus trackbacks since Friday.
With the amount growing steadily I am looking at turning off comments and trackbacks. I would like to know what other think so leave me a comment should I turn them off or leave them on? Or do you have another idea on how to combat the spam.
I fear that trackbacks are dead and gone. Too bad, because they seemed one of the best things about blogging, with the possibility of making actual conversations happen.
As for comments - is captcha not enough?
Posted by: tom s. | January 21, 2008 at 01:46 PM
I was facing the same problem on my blog, at peaks getting about 100+ spam comments/trackbacks a day. Enough to make manual moderation via email too difficult and time consuming.
In my case my blog is powered by Wordpress, so I enabled the Akismet plugin (http://akismet.com/) which has options to automatically delete comments detected as SPAM, or to place them in a folder for later review.
By getting Akismet to place SPAM into a folder, it's much easier to go through the SPAM folder once a week or so and give it a quick glance over (for the very occasional false positives etc) before deleting everything else.
Perhaps your blog engine has an option/plugin for a similiar spam filter system?
Posted by: Christopher Fairbairn | January 21, 2008 at 02:59 PM