How I Deal with Spam Comments

A while back, I started getting an insane amount of spam comments on my blog. Like, crazy insane amounts. I was getting over a dozen spams a day! For a small blogger like me, that seems like an unreasonable amount.

The spam comments are easy to spot...they generally don't make grammatical sense. Also they don't make logical sense, like this one...

"Yo man! How fun to visit your site since we blog about a lot of the same stuff. Visit my site: surfboards for sale"

Um...in what lifetime did I blog about surfboards, surfing, or anything along those lines?? NEVER, obviously!

I almost never got any spams that were inappropriate, and I was fortunate that most of these spam comments were caught by my spam filter. (I just use the default spam settings that come with Blogger.) Every so often one would slip through, and with the amount of spam increasing, the ones slipping through were increasing as well. Even though the comments weren't bad, I want to run a professional, intentional blog, and comments that aren't even close to grammatically correct isn't something I want people visiting my blog to see first thing!

"Excellent beat ! I would like to apprentice while yyou amend your site, how can i subscribe for a blog site? The account helped me a acceptable deal. I had bewen tiny bbit acquainted of this your broadcast offered bright clear idea"

(Yes, that is literally a spam comment I got this week.)

I finally got so fed up with so much spam each day, that I broke the blogging rules and turned on the dreaded captcha.

Not sure what I mean by a captcha? It is sometimes called "word verification," and it looks something like this:

via

I don't know about you, but it is hard to comment on blogs with the captcha turned on. It wastes precious time spent visiting blogs, and gets very frustrating when I can't read the words! A general rule of good blogging is "turn word verification OFF"...but what if you are getting spam? What then, oh blogging guru??

Here is how I handled it:

I tried just leaving the word verification on for a while, to deter the spammers. But when I turned it back on, the spam comments started again. :( Of course!

I really didn't want to turn that back on, so instead, I started moderating comments for posts that are over 14 days old. 

Generally, spam comments come on old posts...even posts a couple years old. Very rarely do they pop up on new content...I don't know why! So now, comments on posts over 2 weeks old have to be moderated by me before they are published. If they are spam, I just delete them. If not, I publish them so they appear on the post.

Let me show you how to set these settings in blogger (not sure what this looks like for you WP people, sorry!)

1. On your blog dashboard click on "settings" (bottom left) and then "posts and comments."

2. In the comment moderation section, select "sometimes" and then enter a number in the box. Set this for whatever you prefer! You can also have your moderation requests sent to your email if that is easier for you.

3. Make sure the "show word verification" box is set to NO!!!!! :)

This should take care of most of your spam! It has drastically reduced the amount of spam I get, and for those that try to slip through the moderation settings stop them from getting posted.

If you are a blogger, do you get many spam comments? How to you control them and respond to them? What comment settings work best for you?


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