Avoid spammers on your blog
How many times have you seen spam on your site? How many times have you struggled to insert captchas or other techniques to get rid of those bots? Well, you have finely made it, but you are now facing a new type of spammers. Humans!
There are people out there who would spend a lot in order to post comments, sign up in guest books etc, just so that they could add a link to their site while posting that comment. Heck, there are people who get paid by companies to do that on a full time basis. They may try to post relevant comment, related to your page's content, so that is why it is even harder to track down this kind of spammers.
How to fix this?
I have been a reader of Smashing Magazine for a long time, and I think they managed to get away from these spammers easily. If you compare Smashing Magazine's comment areas to Tutorial 9's comment section for example, you will see that Smashing Magazine has little comments with links, while Tutorial 9 has links added to almost 100% of their comments. Those are relevant comments, but there's many spam comments you must deny on your own, because no anti-spam technology will track those messages.
So, how come Smashing Magazine is doing that good, and almost nobody has a link added to their comment? The trick is Smashing Magazine doesn't add a URL input field to the comment posting form. But then, how some people are able to add a link to a comment, while others can't? It is quite simple, actually. All you need to do is to submit your comment, then edit it. While in edit mode, you can add your URL. It is as simple as that. And the best thing is that the spammers described above, when they see no URL input field in your comment form, they will run away.
Of course, this is only a temporary solution. Once the word gets out, everyone will start editing their comment and add their link. However, I think that the spamming percentage will be lower even in that case. You can share your techniques to avoid comment spamming. If you liked this article you can subscribe to the full content rss feed.
Published on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 3:13 pm in techniques.
About Bogdan Pop
-
Dustin says: April 10th, 2009 at 5:21 am
That website area in comment forms is there for a reason, might as well use it! Most people actually scan through blog posts or articles with a lot of comments and find new blogs to read. If I see a comment I agree with, and the poster seems interesting, I would enjoy clicking their name and being taken to their website. It’s far from spam of any sort. Although, you do have something here. Comments simply saying things like “great article, i liked it.” I seem to be a little more edgy on. But all in all, who cares.
The comment area is there to simulate discussion between the poster and readers (and sometimes readers with other readers). You could easily catalog such comments as spam, but watch yourself. Soon, you may end up with no comments at all and when that happens, you’ll be back to getting no input from readers. -
admin says: April 12th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Hey Dustin,
Thanks for your comment!
You do have a point. You could consider spam many of those messages and soon end up with nobody commenting. However, you could take out of the equation comments that are longer than lets say, 25 characters.
10 seconds should be enough for a decent comment. During that time you could write something that long. So if you don’t, it may be considered an attempt of spamming, or link building.
The exact opposite of this would be asking people to comment and post their name and a short message so that they win a book or something.
I think that awarding a comment that provides valuable information with regard to its article/post is way better. Not only it will make the winner happy, but he/she will try to post even better comments in the future. -
Avoid spammers on your blog (2) says:
April 15th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
[...] previous spam avoiding post described a nice technique to hide URL input fields from spammer’s eyes. It has received [...]
Liked this article?Stay updated via RSS
Share to others