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There Must Be A Better Way To Deal With Comment Spam
By Neville Hobson
Expert Author
Article Date: 2005-01-07
During the past week, I've had a trickle of comment spam on my blog. Nothing that I'm overly concerned with (not yet, anyway) ...
but sufficient that for the first time since I started this blog, I've been deleting certain comments.
I'm mindful of the experience Trevor Cook reported last week, when he had what appeared to be a concerted comment spam attack on his blog. Trevor's is a TypePad blog, too, like mine, and he had to spend an awful lot of time manually removing loads of such spam.
Shel Holtz was slammed by spammers in early December which led to his switching to a new blog platform that included what appears to me to be a very good spam-prevention mechanism - Captcha, which requires you to fill in a text box from the distorted characters shown in a graphic image. Read this post by Shel for an explanation of it. Shel's blog, incidentally, is based on Expression Engine.
The only way you can deal with comment spam on a TypePad blog is after the event (this is what the TypePad knowledge base article says about it). And that means manually deleting the spams. Nightmare, especially if you have loads such as Trevor did. You can also block the IP addresses. Fine if the spammers always use the same IP address, but they don't.
There is no way - as far as I know - to install a Captcha preventative system on a TypePad blog, at least not on the service level I have (TypePad Plus). Does anyone have any ideas on how to deal with comment spam in a TypePad blog from a preventative point of view, ie, that's before rather than after the event? Other than turning off commenting, that is...
About the Author:
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology. Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson's blog: NevilleHobson.com.
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