Changes coming to prevent spam comments

Mar 23 2010

As Brad’s Reader grows, so does the amount of comment spam. I’m still spending more and more time deleting spam comments, which now seem to outnumber legitimate comments. It’s a fine balancing act because the last thing I want to do is discourage people from participating here. I love reading your thoughts, opinions, experiences and so forth.

So, in order to reduce the time I spend dealing with spam, I’m going to start implementing a few changes that probably won’t affect the majority of legitimate visitors who want to leave a thoughtful comment.

Here’s a list of what I plan to do:

1. Install a stronger spam filter. This should prevent a lot of spam from entering my queue, which means I won’t have to manually delete the spam. My only big worry is that it will block legitimate comments, but I’ll deal with that issue as it arises.

2. Disabling comments for Friday Link Love after one week. Generally, the Link Love posts don’t generate a lot of comments. And the legitimate ones Link Love does get appear within a day or two of being posted. My popular Friday Link Love appears to be a magnet for comment spammers.

3. Last resort: Disable comments on all posts after 60 days. Most spammers target the older posts. The only problem with this is that some of my most popular posts (in terms of comments) are the older ones. I don’t want to discourage anyone from sharing their views so this option might be a little harder to implement.

Like I said before, most of you won’t notice any of these changes. And as always, if you are a first-time commenter and you don’t see your comment approved within 24-hours, please contact me, it might have gotten flagged as spam by mistake. In order to reduce the chances of your comment being flagged as spam, please take a quick gander at my comment policy.

Changes coming to prevent spam comments

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