Cracking Down on Comment Spam
The comment spammers have been at it again pretty aggressively lately, so I’ve been doing a lot of comment deleting. Sometimes, I’m not always sure what’s comment spam and what might be a legitimate comment. Usually comment spam follows a few patterns.
- The number of messages. In an hour, I might get 15-200 comments. Things like that never happen to me in real life, so it must be spam.
- Praise. Many are very short and say something like "Nice site. Good job!" and include a link to something completely irrelevant.
- Gibberish. Some are just a string of seemingly random characters.
- Vagueness. "Here’s another site you’ll like!" just doesn’t make me want to go visit.
- Randomness. "I drink coffee, too!" on a post about Wikipedia … ?
I fear that I’ve probably deleted someone’s well-intentioned comment because it resembled comment spam. Try not to take it too personally. Sometimes, I really can’t tell the difference.
If you want to make sure your comment on this blog sticks around, don’t do the things I’ve listed above in your comment. Make it clear to me and our community why you’re commenting. (Most of you do this already.)
I know some of you use the comments to try to get in touch with me or other community members. Some of those comments seem fairly random at times. Just try to be clear and I should be able to sort it out from comment spam. And if I can’t and I delete your comment, drop me a line and be specific about which comment I should restore.
