Comment spam? Take out the trash

Comments are great. Comment spam is toxic.

photo: donald giannatti

Comment spam harms your blog.

Here's how to wrangle the garbage, step by step.

Zero tolerance

Mark spam comments as spam, which will report them to Google and (maybe) train Blogger's spam filter.

Some off-topic and low-quality comments might not technically be spam. Nonetheless they detract from the conversation you want your readers to enjoy.

You can delete them with or without marking as spam. But don't worry much about the difference. They are not entitled to any consideration from you.

Your loyalty should be to your real readers, not to bots or trolls.

At this point, this blog get tons of spam and I moderate comments. That means no comments are published until I approve them.

Awaiting moderation = not published. Hover over a comment to see the options at right.

You may not need to do that. But here is how to handle spam comments if you get them.

Comments are listed in the Comments section of your dashboard. You can  filter them into All, Published, Spam, and (if you moderate) Awaiting moderation.

Activate your options

On desktop, hovering your mouse pointer over a comment activates clickable icons corresponding to the actions you can take.

Action icons at upper right on hover.

The icons are invisible when inactive.

On mobile, the icons are on a three-dots menu at the upper right of each comment.

For any unpublished comments, awaiting moderation, those actions are as follows. 

Mark as spam

Delete

Approve

Marking a comment as spam moves it to the spam pile without publishing it to your blog. It doesn't delete the comment from your comments queue, though you can do that afterwards.

Note well that you cannot undelete a comment. The trash-can icon is not a friendly repository that you can open and take stuff out of if you change your mind. It is a pitiless one-way trip to the void.

You can mark an approved, published comment as spam, unpublishing it from your blog while retaining it on your dashboard's Comments page (under Spam).

Similarly, the option to approve (and publish) a comment persists even if you have marked it as spam.

Other options

Blogger also has a spam filter that sends some comments directly to the Spam category. Marking spam trains the filter.

However, it's far from perfect and misses a lot of obvious junk.

If you enable moderation, and if you enter an email address to manage comments, you can also moderate comments directly from email notifications. The options are the same: spam, delete, or publish. 

Because the email is generated before the spam filter comes into play, if you moderate from email you won't notice effects of the filter. But there will be no harm done either.

You can alternatively put a captcha in the commenting process to screen out spam bots, who won't be able to identify all the squares with buses in them.

However, your regular readers probably won't enjoy that, and determined trolls and others will still be able to post.

Coming soon: You can also select hundreds of comments at once and mark them as spam in a single stroke.