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| photo: andrej liĊĦakov |
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
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
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.
I've noticed that there is sometimes a bit of a delay in spam comments being flagged by Blogger. I'll get an email notice of the comment, but by the time I go in to remove it, it's already gone. I suspect that people flagging the comments as spam helps that process (and certainly doesn't hurt).
ReplyDeleteThese days I am often marking as spam from within the email notification of the comment, which seems to included auto-flagged ones. So I'm not a good judge of the effectiveness of the spam filter.
DeleteBut it's clearly not perfect, and it's up to us to stay on top of things.
I added a simple CSS rule to my Blogger comment moderation page that indicates if the comment contains a link, since 99% of those are spam.
ReplyDeleteHi Sam, are you using an extension like Stylebot for that?
DeleteI get enough garbage that moderation is really the only way to catch it all. It does mean that readers sometimes are confused when their comment does not show up right away, unfortunately.
Yeah, I'm using Stylus
DeleteHi Adam,
ReplyDeleteQuite recently I stopped getting notifications for a comment on my blog. I hadn't changed any settings on blogger and yet I stopped getting them. This means I have to check on blogger.
It would really help if blogger could send the notification emails for comments again.
Liam.
@Liam, I don't know what might have happened. It could have to do with your email, not Blogger, or something else. If you want to pursue that part of it, I suggest taking it to the help community (link in sidebar). It is just too potentially complicated to unravel here.
DeleteIn the meantime, you could go into Settings and set up comment notification again.
My problem is actually quite the opposite: My normal readers are marked as span and put in spam-jail over and over again. I free them, un-mark them, notify Blogger and so on, every dang time, but it just goes on. Even sometimes my own comments are marked as spam and put on modeartion - and also older comments are suddenly marked and put in spam-prison.
ReplyDeleteAnd on the admittedely rare occasin I do get spam, it goes public at once!
Do you have any useful advice here?
That is distressing! I don't have any special wisdom here, other than to keep marking and unmarking. Google may figure it out eventually.
DeleteFor the spam that is inevitably published, consider moderating your comments. That does have the unhappy effect of confusing some readers, who expect instant publication, but it is better than the captcha in my view.
Thank you. As for spam, I keep older posts moderated, but not the new ones. Except for a month in 2014, I never get more than one spam comment a week - those I can remove manually ;) The other happens in waves, not for a week, then every day, several times a day for a month, and has done for years now, since at least May 22.
Delete