How to Stop Blog Spam in Edu-Blogs

6 October 2009

in Web 2.0 Applications

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I don’t know about you, but I get a lot of spam in my blog comments. In fact only 0.15% are legitimate. Yes the decimal point is in the right place.

Akimet Stats

Most of the spam is just the usual plethora of smut. But a small group of perpetrators are getting through the traps I have set for them. These are the folks who make comments about my posts, usually complimentary (thanks), but they spoil it by putting a link to something completely unrelated to my blog. I had one only this morning that included a link to a particular Grill. So I edited the comment and deleted the link. I don’t often edit comments, but it’s my blog after all so if the content of the comment is not in keeping with my blog I feel justified in doing an edit.

What these commentators don’t realise is

  • I have Askimet in place, which catches most of the spam automatically. It’s very rarely wrong (only 3 false positives in all the time I’ve been using it). Askimet is a plugin for WordPress and very easy to install. If you haven’t got it go get it.
  • I use Disqus which allows me to moderate comments, and also to white/black list people. It picks up any links in comments which I then moderate. So if you comment on my blog don’t bother to put in links that are of no interest to my readers (mainly teachers and edu-techies). Disqus is great as it allows me to have threaded replies to comments. It imported my existing comments with no problems. Chris Brogan first put me on to it and I am very happy with it.

So all you spammers out there, stop spamming my comments, you ain’t going to get through.

Tagged as: Askimet, blogging, Disqus, spam

  • mike_ur_gotoguy
    Thanks for sharing Carol. This is good stuff!
  • Karen Olinarez
    I totally agree. Wow, Almost 15% is spam? no wonder.. Lots of money in elearning blogs..
  • how can we avoid spam in putting a comment here?
  • Well, if you don't put your web address in the comment , it won't show and you won't be spammed that way. Your email never shows. So you won't get spam that way either :)
  • Thanks for the comment Karen. But get that 15 in with the decimal point in the right place. So it's 0.15% legit comments and 99.85% spam! Do people have nothing to do with time???? Comments with Disqus have a no-follow tag anyway so they do not benefit in the search engines at all.
  • Great! Thank you for this advice - the issue has been really driving me nuts.

    The thing I can't stop though are companies in my own niche, sometimes even contacts who write emails asking me if I wouldn't mind blogging about their products.

    The cheek -- I really, really don't know what some people have in their heads at times. I do talk about other people's work but it's resources I have found myself or I really respect what they're doing.

    When someone does this, respect goes out the window and an automatic black mark.

    Karenne
  • Yep, I agree. Though sometimes I get emails from people starting out, asking if I'd look at their product and write a review. For start ups I don't mind so much.
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