Are blog comments dead?
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Tagged with: Today I have upgraded this weblog to Pivot 1.40.1 which is the very latest version of the pretty neat software that powers this site. I've also take the opportunity to remove the last 9rules related stuff that was still here, the list of links at the bottom right of the pages. I've filled this spot with a tag cloud for the time being. There's a lot more that I'd like to change to this site at some point but I'll probably wait with this until Pivot 2.0 comes out. But... this isn't really what this post is about.
The real reason I felt like I just HAD to upgrade is the fact that this release has a feature that seems to have become a necessity: moderated comments. I've mentioned it before, comment spam has moved into a new, extremely hard to beat direction. It's being entered by real humans instead of (fairly) dumb spamming scripts. While comment spam filters such as Akismet or the various ones I developed a few years ago work reasonably well on comment spam being posted by scripts they're all pretty much useless when it comes to the type of spam I've been receiving lately.
The spammers have apparently resorted to paying people to post their crap all over the internet. The comment spam is hand-crafted and the persons posting it have quickly skimmed through the article in order to be able to post something that reads like a legitimate comment. However, the beef is in the URL(s) which are clearly of a promotional nature. It's not hard to distinguish legitimate bloggers / site owners posting insightful comments leaving a link to their own site from the 'hired spammers'. I'm sure lots of you have experienced the same thing.
Since I blatantly refuse to allow any asshole to use my blog as their marketing platform I decided it's time for the last resort: moderated comments. As much as I hate the 'delayed interaction' this results in I feel the daily annoyance of having to remove spam is even worse. On a brighter note though: I do NOT use rel="nofollow" anywhere so if your comment gets through my 'human spam filter' (a.k.a. yours truly) you'll get the search engine advantage. So please, keep the good comments coming.
Dead?
So here's the big question for you all: Are (blog) comments dead? Have the spammers won? To me having to enable moderated comments really does feel like defeat. I've been an active blog spam fighter for quite a long time but I have no appropriate defense in mind for this type of spam. Sad, but true...
What's your take on this issue? Are you also receiving more and more spam of the kind I described in this post? What are you doing to fight it? I'm interested in your insights!
At 21 October '07 - 16:22 Kevin Pascal wrote:
At 21 October '07 - 16:33 Marco wrote:
The reason I upgraded so late is the fact that my blog is kind of full of hacks which I needed to migrate to this version. I’m glad I finally got around it!
At 22 October '07 - 01:41 Pelle wrote:
At 22 October '07 - 05:24 Michael H wrote:
At 22 October '07 - 13:59 Marco wrote:
At 27 October '07 - 18:29 Dusty wrote:
At 28 October '07 - 13:22 Birgit wrote:
I maintain two blogs:
1. Textpattern website, about 150 unique visitors, hardly any spam comments at all, few “good” comments. The only one that came near spam was a comment by a web designer who filled in some keywords instead of his name… I simply deleted the URL :D
2. Wordpress blog, less traffic than the other one, but around 50 spam comments caught by Akismet per day, and 1-2 in the moderation queue. No comments like described by you.
Don’t know why WP doesn’t build in a mechanism that avoids spam like in Textpattern. I’ve given up on scanning through the hundreds of Akismet comments…
Maybe you should really let people sign up or something before enabling them to comment.
At 21 December '07 - 11:28 Ben Ward wrote:
Alas, the tools to aggregate it never really came together very well (although the Technorati API is now capable). I wonder if distributed comments might better allow us to have a domain-based trust system in place; comments from trusted domains would be published and spammers on blacklisted domains would never get through.
I suspect at this point, years later, the problem is not so much with creating tools to aggregate distributed discussion, but instead to encourage bloggers to adopt that style of higher frequency blogging.
I think it would be interesting to try and encourage those who have more substantial things to say — things which could be well integrated into a standalone blog entry of its own — to do so, and use tools to aggregate them. Then, the only direct comments would be less substantial, and hopefully it would be less detrimental to hold them in a moderation queue for a few days.