January 9, 2005

comment spam

2 Comments

In order to bet­ter pro­tect this web­site from the nasty disease that is com­ment spam, I had no alter­na­tive but to turn off the com­ment sec­tion in all posts over 30 days old.
Well over 95% of my rea­ders’ com­ments are left within a few days of the ori­gi­nal pos­ting, so I don’t think it’ll damage the “inte­rac­ti­vity” aspect too much. Obviously, I’d rather not turn the com­ments off, but I was get­ting seve­ral thou­sand com­ments spams a week, so dras­tic mea­sure were nee­ded.
Actually, I wouldn’t call this move too dras­tic…
The MT plug-in that allows you to auto­ma­ti­cally turn the com­ments off once they reach a cer­tain age is a God­send. You can get it here.

2 Responses to “comment spam”

  1. Steve Griffiths says:
    January 9, 2005 at 3:16 pm

    I’m new to this game Hugh. What exactly is com­ment spam, what kind of things get pos­ted? Is it totally ran­dom dreck with the sole pur­pose of remo­tely clog­ging productivity?

  2. Neville Hobson says:
    January 9, 2005 at 3:41 pm

    Hugh, take a look at this rather good docu­ment Six Apart has pro­du­ced re dea­ling with com­ment (and track­back) spam. Extre­mely use­ful, espe­cially if you use Mova­ble Type as you do:
    http://sixapart.com/pronet/comment_spam.html
    I wish there were a way to deal with com­ment spam pre­ven­ta­ti­vely in Type­Pad, but there ain’t.