How Bloggers Can Fight Spam

How Bloggers Can Fight Spam.

By Sarah B.

Bloggers all over the world have learned an unfortunate reality: spammers love to hit any Web site that lets them leave comments.

Many spammers are not human – they’re programmed bots that hit numerous sites every hour, posting links in comments sections. Others are human – these spammers hit plenty of blogs an hour too.

No blogger wants a cluttered, spam-infested comments section, but most don’t necessarily have much free time to deal with spam.

If you have a blog, and you’re trying to fight junk messages, these tips will help you control the garbage without devoting a few hours a day to deleting unwanted comments.

* Require a login to post comments.
Spammers might log in and comment anyway, but many will pass over your site in favor of a “friendlier” one. Making users login before they comment also discourages the anonymous Internet trolls, as they prefer to remain unknown.

* Enable the CAPTCHA feature.
Anybody who wants to leave a comment on your blog must type the series of characters on the screen. This is fairly effective, as most spambots aren’t capable of reading the characters. Many human spammers can’t be bothered.

* Moderate comments.
This feature lets you approve each comment before it appears on your blog. The disadvantage is that you do have to wade through comment spam. However, this is also an easy way to filter out comments from Internet trolls and just-plain-annoying visitors.

Those solutions, however, do not encourage visitors to interact with you, or return in the future.

Many Internet users want things to be as simple as possible: they aren’t really interested in going through an extra step or two simply to comment on your blog.

One of the keys to fighting spam without discouraging your visitors is to keep things as simple as possible. There are, fortunately, several ways to accomplish this.

These methods are not necessarily universal: some blog sites support them, and others don’t. You might have to switch your blog over to another site to take advantage of these features.

However, that might be worth your time if it means that you’ll have a sizable advantage over the spammers.

* Look for spam-fighting scripts.
These bits of programming are often easy to install and don’t typically require much maintenance on your part. Try different scripts to see which one works best with your blog.

* Create a “keyword blacklist.”
You create a list of keywords that will trigger the blog site’s filtering system. If a comment includes one or more of the words on your blacklist, then the comment is not posted.

This can be great for fighting spam, but difficult on your “real” readers. The blacklist looks for keywords, not overall content, so one “bad” word in a legitimate comment causes the site to scrap the whole comment.

These are just a few of the ways that you can fight comment spam.

In most cases, these will drastically reduce the number of spam comments you see on your blog.

However, you should check the blog site that you use to see what unique or site-specific measures it offers.

Each blog site is a bit different from the others, so learn about what your site can do .