Comments

The good with the bad

So, my post on my frustration at finding someone to service my snowblower has generated a fair amount of traffic and is certainly my most commented-upon post since I added the blog. This is exciting for the most part, but has introduced a new problem: spam comments.

I imagine I should be flattered and happy that my blog here is seen has having enough traffic and value that it’s worth it to some folks to drop a spam comment in an effort to boost the profile of their own site. So, um, yay, me. I guess. But it’s annoying because I have to go through and clean things up, genuine readers have to wade through the junk (if they stick around), and it makes me feel taken advantage of. You see, spammers are only dropping comments here because I have rel=dofollow active on the site, which means when you add your website URL to your comment Google will follow the link and count that in your favor when evaluating the Pagerank/significance/etc of your site. This is something I do because I appreciate folks giving my posts their time and attention and it’s a small way to pay them back.

But notice something there: I do it because I appreciate folks giving my posts their time and attention. Dropping a quick comment just to gather some link juice for your own blog does not count. So what to do?

Dealing with comment spammers

Well, the toughest step can be figuring out who the actual spammers are. Sometimes it’s easy: the post is full of URLs and gibberish-classic spambot behavior. Other times the spam is a bit more subtle: The comment is clearly written by a person, and sounds like they read what was written, but the comment lacks specifics and doesn’t really say anything beyond, “Nice post–keep up the good work!” But these comments are often betrayed by included URLs that point right back to some sales site, or the entered email is some weird collection of letters. A clear indicator to me: You try to tell me your name is Lose Weight Today or some BS like that. Sorry, no.

A new comment policy

…is being worked out. In the meantime, I’m going to go through old comments and delete the ones that fail my sniff test (if it smells like spam, it’s spam). My apologies in advance if a delete a comment that you made in earnest. I’m actually going to be pretty generous on this round since I’m only now laying down some ground rules–though I should have known better and had these place long ago. Ah, well.

I’ll probably end up implementing captchas or the like. They’re a pain, I know, but not as much of one as something like going through a whole double-opt-in registration process. I just want to put in a small enough barrier that only someone who is really interested in contributing to the conversation will go through it.

Or I might just turn off dofollow.

If anyone has any better ideas, let me know in the comments. And be real about it.

Update Okay, I think I’ll leave all the comments in place because some of them make me laugh and some of them are glaring examples of how not to leave a comment on my blog. For example, no one is named Free Web Directory. So some folks are getting a free ride with the link juice for now, but, again, I intend to be more rigorous in the future.

Picture by f_mafra