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« Speedy Writing | Main | Murder in NYC »

May 17, 2006

Apologies

[I'll remove this post in a day or so.]

2 Blowhards is being hit by a blizzard of on-line gambling spam in Comments sections of items posted during the last month or so.

Just before writing this, I found that spam comments were arriving faster than I could delete them.

I haven't checked with Michael, but I for one welcome any suggestions. It would be a shame and would harm this blog greatly if commenting had to be curtailed or made difficult for legitimate readers.

Later,

Donald

posted by Donald at May 17, 2006




Comments

I've spent an hour this morning deleting commentspam myself. Not nearly as fun as speedwriting, I gotta say. I'm checking with our webguy about what he might do for us, but I'd certainly be grateful for tips from anyone knowledgeable ...

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 17, 2006 11:00 AM



One possibly quick and easy solution is to add a randomly produced image that the commenter must read and enter with the submission of their comment. You can find an example of this at the ChicoBoyz.net weblog. It is also a common feature of email hosts like Yahoo. That is, to get an account you must enter in the text that you see in their random image.

I am assuming that this feature is offered by your web-hosting company.

Posted by: Ian Lewis on May 17, 2006 12:25 PM



ChicoBoyz.net should be ChicagoBoyz.net. My mistake.

Posted by: Ian Lewis on May 17, 2006 12:25 PM



!ChicoBoyz! Yes, amigos, we are now multi-culti ;)

Seriously, I highly recommend using an image-recognition system. We get essentially no automated spam anymore. Our system is the popular plugin that was written by James Seng and works with old versions of MT (we are using 2.6x). Very easy to install and configure. Feel free to contact me if you have questions about it.

Posted by: Jonathan on May 17, 2006 01:24 PM



If you're using moveable type, you could try Akismet. We've had it on ScienceBlogs for about a month now and have have very few troubles with comment spam.

Posted by: Dave Munger on May 17, 2006 02:12 PM



Regarding the image recognition thing, you guys are the only blog I frequent which still doesn't use one! I'm surprised you don't get more spam than you do.

The other option is making commenters join a sign-in service like like Blogger or Typekey or what have you. I've found this to be a real pain for commenters, and it discourages comments from new visitors who just surfed in. The result is that comment threads on such sign-in blogs tend to get cliquey.

Image recognition is the way to go, IMO. Blocks spambots without discouraging newbies.

Posted by: Brian on May 17, 2006 03:57 PM



By the way, speaking of comment nightmares - the Bidinotto Blog crashed for a few days recently, and when it came back up all the old comments were gone. The folks are hunting them down from Google's cache and reentering them under each post.

As if you don't have enough to worry about...

Posted by: Brian on May 17, 2006 04:09 PM



Thanks for tips, which I'm passing along to our wonderful webguy.

Wow, losing all the comments ... That would be awful. I just checked, and 22,337 comments help make up this blog. I hope people are copying and keeping records of their own comments. If this blog goes down and its comments get lost, it's hard to imagine going off in search of 22,337 of them ....

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on May 17, 2006 04:31 PM



Back everything up. It helps if your hosting company runs its own backups too.

Posted by: Jonathan on May 17, 2006 04:56 PM



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