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Using Google to Fight Comment Spam
time to read 1 min | 144 words
This seems like an obvious way, but it is worth mentioning. I was reviewing the search phrases people use to get to my site, and I found some... extremely explicit ones. Not what you would expect on this site. Repeating the search in google brought me a to a post that had several spam comments of the more nasty side. That gave me the idea of trying:
site:ayende.com explicit-word-or-phrase
I found a lot of those, sadly, and I was able to remove ~50 or so spam comments fairly easily. The main issue with spam is separating the chaff from grain, google made it very easy to find the bad stuff.
Comments
I have my blog set up to email me every time I receive a comment. Not only does it allow me to respond to people's comments/questions, but I also get alerted to the more unsavory comments that should be removed. I have seen a lot of bloggers resort to disallowing comments on posts older than X days to fight comment spam, though I haven't had to take this measure. I have had to resort to turning off trackbacks as I was getting 50 automated link spam trackbacks to every real trackback - and I was not getting an insignificant number of real trackbacks either. It sucks, but the trackback mechanism is totally broken.
I found the Akismet system used by Wordpress to be very effective at combating both trackback and comment spam. I'm waiting to see how well Community Server handles both.
You can actually access Akismet through Wordpress's API from other blog engines as well. Might be worth looking into adding that to Subtext if it's not already there.
Comparatively, I think you get very little spam compared to genuine comments... But hey, that's a nice idea.
Chris
You deleted my posts??? I happen to forget your url a lot -- ayende.com isn't intuitive. I find searches such as, ayende explicit-phrase is the best way to find your most useful content.... I want you to know how much I appreciate your blog entries, so I leave descriptive comments!
If thats the way you feel, I'll be boring from now on :P
Wendy, are you trying to tell me something?
What would the husband say?
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