10 ways to fight spam
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How can bloggers fight spam?
1. Use a contact form. Don't make your email address public. Especially not as a clickable link. Here are some more reasons to avoid using clickable email address links.
2. Use a different email for each site you sign up for. Then if one email account starts getting spammed, you only have to change it in one place. This is more to do with email spam than blog spam, though.
3. Use a different email when posting comments. Who knows if the blog you're commenting on will keep that email private? They might start sending you messages you didn't ask for with no way to unsubscribe. Best to use a dedicated email address just for posting comments.
4. Banning IP addresses. This is a bit extreme unless you notice some very clear patterns in the spam you receive. Also, be careful, as banning by IP can also block legitimate Internet use.
5. Moderation. This means that every comment on your blog will be held until you approve it. The downside is that it requires a lot of manual effort, and may not be an option for blogs that get hundreds of comments every day. However, if you can add users to an "approved" list so you only have to approve their first comment, this seems like a very sensible solution to the spam problem. Well, unless your blog attracts lots of new users every day and many of them only write a small number of comments.
6. Anti-spam plugins. WordPress users will probably know about Akismet, a plugin that analyses comments as they come in and attempts to flag the ones that look like spam. Generally, it works well, but no system is perfect - the most common issue I've seen is the problem of false positives (i.e. legitimate comments being flagged as spam). So you do need to check that the right comments are being let through and that the bad ones are being flagged.
7. Word verification. Also know as a CAPTCHA, this uses an image of distorted letters and numbers and requires you to type the characters into a box. Get it wrong and you have to try again. I think these are quite effective so long as they are easy to read - I've seen some CAPTCHA images that are really terrible! However, a few people have problems with it, either because they can't read the text or because the system tells them they mis-typed the text when they didn't (I've seen examples where it doesn't work for reasons unknown). Finally, there are some people who refuse to comment on sites that use word verification.
8. Closing comments after a specified period of time. This method works on the assumption that a few months down the line, nobody will want to add anything new to your post. Spammers seem to enjoy targeting posts that have long since disappeared from the front page of a site, hoping that the site owner won't notice the spam. I've had some great comments weeks or even months after I originally published a blog entry, so at first glance this method doesn't seem logical to me.
However, I recently learned a little more about this when I wiped benbarden.com and started again, deleting all the old posts. Suddenly my comment spam stopped. I did notice some weird things happening and discovered a bug that allowed people to comment on posts that didn't exist - so they weren't even using the conventional way of commenting, it was obviously someone with a script to automatically submit comments to my blog. Once I plugged that hole, the spam stopped.
It's not a permanent fix - and I understand that most sites would never delete all their content! Once your new posts get picked up by search engines, there's a chance for the spam to creep back in, But if you close comments after a certain amount of time, this can really cut back on your comment spam.
9. Requiring registration. This is likely to limit your comments drastically, and is still not a guaranteed way to stop spam. It's a good method for blogging networks or sites that offer more than just a blog, but it's a bit too draconian for most blogs.
10. Turning off comments altogether. No comments, no spam, right?! OK, you might not get any comment spam this way, but don't cut off your readers! This method is a bit extreme - does anyone use it?
Which methods do you use? How effective are they?
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Comments on 10 ways to fight spam
2
I have to agree with the separate emails for all your websites.
What I suggest is the you get a gmail account and the use the +addon feature and forward all your new domain specific emails to your gmail account.
For example, for Broken Infinity Blogs, I have an email Josh@brokeninfinityblogs.com and I forward it to joshfinnie+BIB@gmail.com and for my 140pl.us contact, I created Josh@140pl.us and forwarded it to joshfinnie+140@gmail.com.
This allows you to have special emails for each of your websites and allows you to use the wonderful gmail spam filter! It's a win, win situation!
3
I have a comment form, moderation, and 2 anti-spam plugins on my blog. I still get quite a bit of spam, considering how few legitimate comments I get. I'd like to find a plugin to close comments on posts over a certain age - based on the spam I get, I think that will cut out a LOT of spam for me.
4
I use most of these (not the last one though). I use a CAPTCHA on my contact form but this is the only place where I use it. I actually do not like these things and will normally think twice about commenting on a site that uses them.
The + feature on GMail comes in very handy for all the different Email addresses you have mentioned here.
5
Askimet seems to catch most of my spam. I also moderate all first time commentators. I have switched to trying to publish every other day, rather than every weekday and am getting more comments as the posts now stay at the top longer. (which was one of your tips on another post, come to think of it)
6
I really need to get on board! I tried to upload the contact from (in the previous Wordpress version) and had it a hard time getting it to work so I don't use one. I hate to say it, but I use my email address which I know is a BIG no-no, but I didn't have any other choices at the time.
I also don't do the distorted letter thing either because I find it annoying when I have to do it. You're right though, its probably a good idea!
7
This is an awesome top ten list, really good advice. We struggle with whether or not requiring registration, as many people want to participate but not register. You can post this to our site and then link back to your site. We are looking for content and in return our users will track back to your site. The coolest feature is you can let other people vote on the rankings of your list.
8
Thanks for the comments guys. :)
Josh - I just use forwarders that go to my main email account. I stopped using Gmail last week for a number of reasons, explained here: Why I abandoned Gmail and installed Thunderbird
Alan - did you know that every single one of your comments goes into my spam queue even after I keep approving them? It's possible there may be a reason for this - feel free to ask at the CMF Forums if you need some pointers.
Vince - thanks for the offer, however I'd prefer not to duplicate my posts on another site. Also, I've had several comments along these lines on my blog along with one private email - I'm not interested thank you - could you stop now please?
9
I must admit that I currently don't do ANY of these. I was planning on adding captcha when/if it became necessary. So far I haven't had any trouble with spam but I am sure that will only last so long...
10
Boo to #7. With #9 I found that requiring registration only made more spammers register than real people so that definitely did *not* work for me.
11
Thanks for the reminder about closing comments. I forgot I could do that. I was getting a lot of spam on one old post in particular, so I shut them off for just that post.
12
I'm running 2 different antispam methods on my websites. One is captcha which does very good job. In fact I'm receiving only manual spammy comments, however it's possible to filter them based on number of links, presence of words, and so on.
The second one uses only words-based filter. It works fine too.
However, soon I'll have to integrate another condition into the words-based filter; Simple test for presence of dots. Commas and dots (or symbols such as !?;) usually mean that the comment is human-typed. I also hate comments without dots or commas... then one has to guess the point as words, sentences and paragraphs aren't divided and the sense is missing.
13
Jan - thanks for stopping by. :) I always found CAPTCHA to be the most effective method, but unfortunately it seems to be one of the most annoying for my readers. I haven't used it on any of my blogs for a month or two, and people seem to be happier than when they had to fill it out to leave a comment.
14
This seems to be the best resource available to fight comment spam. This is wonderful piece of advice. At this point there is not much of spam that i encounter, probably because there isn't much traffic.
These procedures are going to be used by me anyways, it is better to be safe than sorry:)
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I block spam by number of links. Blocks around 95% of spam at my blog, extremely low rate of false positives and even if legitimate comment has multiply links (which they don't) commenter gets sane message about that (none "I think you are spammer or maybe your browser is broken" crap).
Unfortunately anti-spam field in such terrible shape that most people use over what is pushed and advertised to them instead of thinking what they need in speicfic case and how to get it done.