Comment spam on Blogger:Keep it clean

photo: andrej lišakov

Comment spam hurts your blog.

Block and manage it by

• moderating comments, or requiring commenters to solve a captcha (no need to do both)
• marking spam, which trains Blogger's spam filter.

Spam comments are fake. They masquerade as friendly conversation, pretend to praise your blog with generic compliments, include links to unrelated commercial sites or to malware, or do other weird things.

As I write this, I am getting huge batches of AI spam comments that mention the title of the blog post, and then just says stupid AI stuff about my title that no actual person would ever say. 

It is entirely automated: someone just entered the url of my blog into an app and clicked "go."

What a time to be alive!

You don't want spam on your blog. Spam is a sign of neglect and will discourage readers from leaving real comments.

If the comments include links to malware sites, Google might delete your blog.

Wrangle the spam

Enable comments notification in the Blogger settings to stay on top of things.

You can enable a captcha in your blog settings, or moderate comments. No need to do both.

Manage spam from the Comments page of your dashboard. Mark them as spam to train the spam filter and, if published, to remove them from your blog.

If you get a flood of spam, there's bulk spam management: mark 100 comments (or more) at a time.

Unanswered spam questions

Why do they do it? Spam is boring mystery. I do not know what the business model is for comment spam. Mostly, I don't care, either.

Probably a lot of it relates to boosting Google page rank using obsolete tactics from decades ago. These people are a mix of sly and stupid.

Maybe some of the weirder stuff marks blogs for later attacks, on the theory that blogs that permit the spam are neglected and likely vulnerable.

Whatever. Just mark it as spam and move on.

Is marking as spam better than just deleting it? I honestly don't know, but it can't hurt. It is supposed to train Blogger's spam filter.

The spam filter does sometimes send comments directly to spam without moderation, but it's spotty. 

It won't catch everything. That's your job.

Most of the older spam comments on this blog (from ten years ago!) that had Blogger profiles associated with them no longer do. This suggests the accounts are now deleted. 

That might be a result of spam reports, or something else. However, some of these accounts that spammed a decade ago are still online.

No need to keep spam around for as long as I do, unless (like me) you are curious to see what happens to the spam accounts over time.