The power of the blog comment has turned commenting into a free-for-all contest for this powerful piece of blogging real estate. As your blog grows in readership and popularity, it will act as a magnet. The blog should entice thoughtful readers to communicate with you. On the other hand, the blog will seem to attract inane, exploitive, and occasionally insidious commentators who want to use your comment section as a means to drive traffic towards another website or to be mischeivious. How do we deal with this blog comment spam?
Here are six ways to prevent spam in your blog's comments:
(1) Enable comment moderation most blogging software has the option of forcing comments into a comment moderation mode. This means that all comments will appear in a queue for the blogger to review before they appear on the blog. You can approve the comments, letting them pass out of the queue and onto your blog. You can also choose to delete the comment so that it never appears. Comments in moderation will be automatically deleted after a certain point in time (e.g. approximately two weeks later). Some bloggers swear by this method because in addition to spam, it also allows the blogger to pick and choose which comments appear on their blog. On the downside, comment moderation can also discourage other people from commenting, preventing potentially rewarding contact and conversation.
(2) Akismet has become a godsend to many bloggers because it has the ability to stop comment spam while letting more benign traffic flow directly onto your blog. Akismet is an add-on program for Blogger and Wordpress.com blogs and can also be used on hosted Wordpress installs. Akismet works just like comment moderation, but more often than not it allows non-spammy comments to appear on your blog without problems. Occasionally Akismet will miss spam and sometimes it will block comments that are perfectly fine. However, most bloggers think that the benefits of Akismet far outweigh any downsides that it might have. Akismet is now commonly used on many blogs.
(3) Another way to prevent spam in your blog comments is to force your users to register with your blog so they can leave comments there. ReadWriteWeb is one example of a blog that requires a user sign-on, as does writer/actor Wil Wheaton's personal blog. This can certainly limit the amount of spam that your blog will receive because it's now harder to place it there. However, this also discourages people who just want to talk.
(4) You can contact the spammer directly and ask them to stop. Blog comments typically force the user to provide an E-Mail address with their comments. While this is sometimes helpful, the fact is that many spammers attempt to hide their true identities to avoid being blamed for spamming. It may be worth a try but it has a low probability of deterring an experience and determined spammer.
(5) A more drastic method to prevent blog comment spam is to contact the spammer's hosting company and ask for them to intervene if the spammer has provided this information (assuming that it's not fake), you can contact their hosting company. In some cases these hosting companies will ban these individuals or otherwise suspend their activities.
(6) The "nuclear option" for preventing span is to not allow any comments on your blog writer Seth Godin is famous for not allowing comments on his blog posts. This is the least desirable outcome, because blogs were designed to be forums for two-way communication that is the purpose and power of the blog comment. However, blog commenting features can be disabled. This may be a last resort but it comes with a great cost. You, the blogger, stand to lose a lot if you disable your blog comments, but situations may arise where there is no better alternative.
Many of us have experienced the annoyances caused by spam in blog comments. We are fortunate to have a number of ways to deal with blog comment spam. Certain methods, like Akismet, will probably work fine in the vast majority of cases. Other methods, less desirable, are available if you need to use them. If you do get spam, don't panic. Just try these methods as needed until you find the ones that work best for you. Good luck!