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.

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.