Folks, here are the results of
my what-to-do-about-spam poll:
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| But it only equals 98%. ????? |
Even though nobody likes the current word verification on Blogger, it was readers' preferred anti-spam method with 45% of the votes. That's the option I went with, and I'll explain why below.
Comment moderation came in second. As many of you point out, it can be time consuming if one has a lot of comments. I think too, it stifles a conversation, if the comments aren't approved quickly. On interesting posts, readers often read through the comments as well, and add their thoughts to what's being said. I also considered that I'd still be confronted with the spam and to be honest, I don't even want to read about free photos of celebrities in their birthday suits.
Disallowing anonymous accounts came in third, even though almost 100% of spam is in this category. To those of you who do not allow anonymous commenting on your blogs, I'm curious as to how much spam you do get. There are actually very few of you who comment via anonymous, mostly WordPress bloggers. Those who do always sign their name, so I know who respond to. I appreciate that.
I mentally divide comment spam into two types: the obnoxious kind, and the sales kind. The obnoxious kind is almost always about porn. Thanks to Blogger's excellent spam filter, these never get published. But the spammers know that. Their target is you, the blog owner. They know that if you have comments forwarded to your email account, you still have to look at them, even if it's only to delete them. Then too, legitimate comments sometimes get routed to the spam folder, so I still have to fish though it on occasion to approve these. Spammers hope to either hook you or to annoy you. Whether I disable word verification or choose comment moderation, I still have to deal with them and I feel like they still win in a sense. Unfortunately I get too many of these and since word verification eliminates them, I've gone back to that. There you have it.
The biggest complaint about word verification is that it is often impossible to read. I think we have a couple of options here.
Rather than get annoyed, you can try clicking on the reload button.
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| Click the reload button for a clearer word verification |
Within one or two reloads, you should get one that is easier to read.
If you have a Blogger blog, consider sending feedback. You'll find a "send feedback" button on the lower right hand corner of your behind the scenes pages.
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| Click on "send feedback," to, well, send feedback |
I send feedback as needed. If I'm having a problem, I state it, but I never criticize. While Blogger staff never respond personally, the problems do get addressed. Also, if I like something, I let them know. If they fix something, I thank them. I did send feedback about word verification, asking if it could be simplified somehow because it was discouraging people from commenting.
Some of you have said you don't comment on blogs with word verification and I respect that. I'm still honored by your visits. For those who do comment, I always try to return the blog visit unless the comment is from the other kind of spammers.
The other kind of spam is what I call sales spam. These comments are more likely to get through Blogger's spam filter when they are posted by a real person who can negotiate word verification. Oftentimes they seem relevant to the post, but sometimes they are so off base as to be hysterical. I delete them all, and here's why.
Search engine rankings take a number of things in to account. One of them is the number of links to one's site, especially links coming from other sites with a lot of traffic. You can see how they'd think that by commenting on blogs, especially well read ones, they'd boost their rankings. Or so they hope. What most of these spammers probably don't know, is that Google automatically uses the 'rel="nofollow"' attribute tag for all links in the comments. (Read it from the horse's mouth,
here.) This is a computer code which tells search engine robots not to follow the link. Hence comment links do not get indexed and do not boost search engine rankings. Or maybe these spammers do know it. In that case their hope is that you will click through to check out the link. That counts as a hit and hits boost rankings too.
Since sales spam often looks like a legitimate comment, how can I tell where their link will take me without clicking on it? In both Firefox and Chrome browsers, the link's URL will be displayed in the lower left hand corner if you hold your cursor over the link.
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By holding your cursor over the link, it's destination address
will be displayed in the lower left hand corner of Chrome & Firefox |
These are the only two browsers I have, so if you use a different browser, please let us know if this works for you.
If the comments are "anonymous" this technique will usually show a link to a commercial website or blog. Occasionally though, spammers will register with Blogger to get around the "no anonymous" option for comments. In that case, hovering over their link will show a Blogger profile. Under their profile you can hover over their links to find out where they will take you.
Why do spam comments usually end up on old posts? One reason of course, is to try to sneak it in. If a blogger doesn't have their comments forwarded to their email address, they may not even know about them. Sales spammers seem to like to put them on posts relevant to what they're trying to sell. They do a search with a particular keyword, like "kitchen cabinets," to find relevant posts to drop comments for free links back to their site. I have to assume though, that if they have the spare time to do that, then they or their product must not be all that great. Otherwise wouldn't they be busy with real sales?
One way to deal with these is to turn off comments for that particular post.
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Choose a "don't allow" option to
close comments on a particular post. |
That's done from the post editor. On the right sidebar of the post you wish to close comments on, choose "options" and select the one you want.
In the end, what to do about these is a matter of preference. You may feel that having the comment is a fair trade. I delete them all. I think that putting them on old posts or trying to pass them off as interested comments is sneaky. Who would do business with sneaky people? And why would I want to give free advertising for a product or service I would never purchase? Especially since the gist of this blog is about working toward self-sufficiency. Legitimate sales folks will do one of two things. They will either ask the blog owner for a link, or they will advertise through
AdSense. AdSense give a blogger an option to allow sales ads on their blog and make a little money for doing so.
Well, that's enough off topic stuff for this century. It's relevant to blogging though, so I hope it it offers a suggestion or two for new bloggers especially. If you have another idea, I'd like to hear that too.
Next post.... back to all things homesteading.
