Updated March 2, 2010
All comments will be marked as spam if
- The comment looks really generic i.e. it could apply to any post
- The comment mentions that my site doesn’t load in your browser. I get a lot of these comments and they are all worded exactly the same. Kinda suspicious, huh?
- If I have no idea what your comment is saying. Jibberish and pretend words get nuked.
- You won’t take the time to write a clear and coherent comment. I understand many readers speak/write English as a second language and I will happily forgive a few misspellings.
But there is a huge difference between that and a blatant disregard for the form and structure of the English language. Leaving a comment on someone’s blog is not the same as texting a junior high buddy.
Updated July 20, 2010
I have been getting an increasing number of spam in my comments. The sole purpose of these comments is to get back links.
Because of this I am enacting a stricter comment policy. Anyone with a previously approved comment will have their comments automatically approved. All other comments all comments will be held for moderation and will not appear until they are approved.
Do not put links in comments
Unless you are linking to something that is relevant and related to the subject at hand, do not put links in comments. You can put your url in URL Field but don’t put it in the main comment box.
If you are only here to get a free back link then go to: Free Back Links To Your Site
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{ 28 comments… read them below or add one }
To be honest that sounds like a fair approach, with not too much disincentive to contribute.
Good idea to restrict comments to useful stuff (OK, i don't know if this comment is really useful).
You already blogged about this topic in June and there was much usefuls stuff said, mainly that YOU are the one who decides what gets published here.
http://nickstraffictricks.com/2812_comment-spamme…
So, lets keep this place clean and and don't over-use Nick's hospitality
Hey Nick! I think you've done a really good move here to have a better comment policy. I know how you feel, had an issue as well with my own personal blog like this, and just decided to cut some of the junk that was going around.
On a side note… I don't see any contact box option on your website, but I noticed in one of the lists that I am subscribed to you there is a gmail account to replay to, so I will try sending an email to that comment. Be on the lookout for an email with the subject "More on comment spam"
Till then,
Jean
It seems to me like the above comments are spam Nick.
I think they are ok. I have interacted with them before.
Sorry Andy I am not a spammer
With the way bots have gotten lately, its certainly a wise move to adopt this strategy as it's tough to sort out the good from the bad and the useful comments from the spam anymore. More and more bloggers are doing similar things to combat spam.
Great move, should make the blog more enjoyable
With the way thing have gotten these days I am not surprised you have opted to do this. I have had my link jacked on a couple sites, and I thought that was fixed. I have also found that people are scraping comments and re adding them as a different name or tag.
I'm commenting for the first time Nick so I will probably get caught by your filter.
I'm a couple of weeks away from relaunching my site and I actually had a question about how you're going to screen out spammers. Do you use a Wordpress tool for this task? Is there an automated way to screen out people who haven't been approved to comment Nick?
BTW, great blog, my friend. I really have learned quite a bit from your articles. The 30 days series is excellent!
Thank you. I'm glad you found the blog so useful.
> I’m a couple of weeks away from relaunching my site and I actually had a question about how you’re going to screen out spammers. Do you use a WordPress tool for this task?
> Is there an automated way to screen out people who haven’t been approved to comment Nick?
I use a free WordPress plug-in called Akismet and it does an excellent job of identifying spam.
Your WordPress comment settings give you a lot of flexibility for handling comments. You should spend some time getting familiar with it. For example, I changed my settings so that all comments are held for moderation unless that person has had a previously approved comment. This helps to ensure that spam never shows up in my comments.
Once you begin getting traffic you need to make sure that you check the comments that have been marked as spam every single day. Every day I briefly looked through the 10 or 20 comments that have been marked as spam. This whole process takes me about a minute.
Really its a great step to prevent spam and bloody spammers.I wonder how Matt Cutts handle the Google's spam team,its really a challenging task.There should be some restrict rule against spammers.Nice read…..
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I know what you mean about comments that say the site is not working in some way or another. My blogs are filled with comments such as these. I can usually tell what a spam comment looks like but it takes forever to go through a huge list of these. Unfortunately even I am sometimes fooled when it comes to spam comments.
- Robert
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Great to see you tweaking this once again Nick, I know from time to time I still read what appears to be "fake" comments on your site, glad to see you stepping it up another notch.
-Jean
Just out of curiosity, how many spam comments do you receive on a daily basis? I am asking because I plan to convert some of my static HTML sites to blogs in the very near future and would like to know how much unproductive work I have to plan for.
Also do you have a post (or can create one for the future) about how to handle spam comments?
As was said in an other commentfurther up, lets keep this blog clean and add useful content.
The amount of comment spam you receive is somewhat proportional to the amount of traffic you get. Most people starting out don't a ton of traffic and don't really have to worry about comment spam.
I have been testing some different comment spam plugins and I just posted something today on my most recent test: http://nickstraffictricks.com/5209_new-plugin-red…
"The comment looks really generic i.e. it could apply to any post"
This first bullet point you made reminded me of one of my first comments I got on my new blog. I was so flattered at first that they said I was an excellent writer and they were looking forward to my next posts I felt I was walking on air…. but just for a little bit. I did a Google search and found tens of thousands of these exact comments and was disappointed to see there was even software for this kind of garbage. All for backlinks. In the trash with that one immediately after.
That exact same thing happened to me and I was very disappointed to find that it was spam.
Do most of these spam comments come from software programs being run by the spammer? Spam comments are so ubiquitous that there have to be programs running in the background.
It seems that there are enough blogs that automatically allow comments to be added without any moderation, giving spammers a reason to keep on clogging up the blog world. I am still amazed that spam emails are sent out. People actually visit the links inside these emails?
- Andrew
Much of the comment spam that I receive is from automated sources.
The reason why we still get spam in our e-mail is because there is virtually no cost to send e-mail. Let's say it costs $30 to send 10 million e-mails. If you only make a couple sales it will more than pay for the $30 fee.
Compare that to sending 10 million postcards through the United States Postal Service.
Doesn't the Akismet plugin take care of automated spam comments? I thought it keeps a database of the IPs of prolific spammers and automatically deletes their comments.
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Akismet does a db of spam comments, and puts them in the "spam" folder instead of deleting them. I got tired of going through the spam folder to find the false positives.
well you have right, people should write comment that have something with the post , and not just general thing s like nice post, keep it uo etc
cheers
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Actually spammers are getting smarter and smarter. One day when i was approving some comments i saw some comment which nobody can imagine that they were posted with the help of a bot. I did approved that comment but the next day when i was doing the same thing i found similar comment too.
Bottom line is webmasters has too become smarter then these idiots spammers who are here to spoil our lives.
I agree with nick and think that registration should be made possible and at least for 2 days comment posting with links should be not allowed.
Just my 2 cents.
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Good points. I now delete any comments that looks too generic and unfortunately I am probably deleting a few valid comments.
Hey Nick, can we add our post links in the website field or we must add only homepage URL?
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You can put any url in the field.
fair enough.. nice and strict policy to keep a check.. but man really hats off you take off time to even check the comments.