Hi there blog owners I've been doing a bit of SEO on my sites, mainly by blog posting and it's really made me start thinking about starting a blog myself. I'm pretty sure I could easily generate enough useful content by myself and with others on my chosen hobby topic. What I'm worried about though is the amount of spam I'll have to deal with. I've never operated a blog before and I'm wondering... [I know that this will depend on how popular the blog is so I'm looking for your experiences in relation to how popular your blog is] The verification code thing presumably removes anything automated, so how many human comments do you have to approve daily/weekly and how many of them are obvious spam? Also do you have any rules of thumb that make weeding out spam quicker? cheers!
Well i have askimet on my blogs to handle spam and i must say its one of the best tools for fighting and dealing with spam, its really quite clever and deals with a lot of it automatically, leaving just a little sometimes for you to sort through and handle yourself. But it really helps.
Yes if you use Wordpress to blog that will help stop most spam in comments also make sure you don't put your e-mail address anywhere on the site unless you dont mind recieving spam to that address
If you're worried about spam comments, as pipes mentioned, Akismet comes in the box with WordPress and it is an excellent plugin for dealing with spam. Assume that most of them will be caught. So far, I haven't seen a legitimate comment go into the spam box, while catching a few thousand. Regarding going through all the comments posted by humans, it's really up to you. There's a setting so that you can allow the author of a previously approved comment to post a comment without having it moderated. That might take the burden off a bit (although I personally don't use this option). Usually, I let a normal comment get through even if it may not be the top notch comment you're looking for. When I used to run a bigger blog, it usually took less than an hour per day to go through the comments. It's really not that big of a stress, unless you're getting hit with a couple thousand a day...
wow, an hour a day is a bit more than i was thinking! How many visitors was that one getting per day! How does the Akismet thing work? Is it the verification code thing?
Also, just as I think of it, what kind of anchor texts do you allow your commentors to use? Do you insist that they use their name? Do you allow them to post keyword names if their comments are useful?
For spams you have akismet, spam karma, recaptcha and what not. Trust me, its not that terrible when it comes to spam vs wordpress plugins!
As long as the comments adds to the coversation, i allow any kind of keywords. But if it is somehing like " I completely agree with your post" with a anchor that says belfast hotels, I delete it without even a blink so as not to encourage him from further spamming my blogs. Otherwise Akismet does a damn good job. And I spend about half an hour each day approving comment. I reply to comments, and i think comments are meant to be replied. and I used that as an excuse to moderate...
there are some useful free plugin to solve that issue: 1.askimet 2.math solve 3.try to search wordpress.org plugin section..you can find your solution. thanks
Askimet works. It comes preinstalled with every Wordpress setup It'll catch most of the spam. Also, as another security layer I have enabled comment moderation. You can make Wordpress put all comments in the moderation queue so you can approve them or mark 'em as spam
As Blogspotter mentioned, moderating comments is not all about deleting and approving the right ones. A big portion of it is also replying to them, which is why it took an hour or less per day. Just to note, that site was pretty big so...