internet

“It's enough to drive any blog owner crazy!  But what can you do?”

If you don't suffer blogspam, you will certainly have seen the adverts for medical products, gambling, links to websites and porn in the comments of blogs and, for that matter, ordinary websites.  It's a problem that, if you think about it, will only get worse so, as my friend above asked - what can you do?

First, for people who don't suffer, here is a word of advice - if you don't get blogspam you soon will!  What usually happens is that the site url gets on a list and from that moment you get a whole stream of it.  Spam comments are produced by automated programs and, just like email spam, once your name is listed spam arrives like rain from heaven!  So, if you don't suffer, read on and be prepared for when you will.

Fortunately the war against spam is unceasing and some new products that are designed to eliminate blogspam are already out there.  They work usually by checking comments against a database of spam and rejecting likely submissions and holding them for you to finally delete within a certain time frame.

We have not tested any blogspam programs but we understand that they effectively remove much of it

We have not tested any blogspam programs but we understand that they effectively remove much of it.  However, just like regular spam, blogspam evolves to meet the threats against it and so the war continues.  We expect that one day soon all blog hosts will automatically provide spam filters in the way that email programs do now.

If you host our own blog, you can use two rather simpler but none the less effective methods that you can find as script modules. 

The first is the Reverse Turing test which simply asks a question at submission that only a human can answer - for an example see the bottom of this article as you submit your comment!  These are quite effective and easy to implement but the question does need to be changed quite often.

You can also use the popular Complete Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) which is the little image with the words or numbers that you have to read and type in.  So far computers have not had much luck at reading these but note the words 'so far'.

So, whether you suffer blogspam or you don't, the best thing to do is to be prepared.  Mouse over to your host's website and find out what policy and tools they have and put these in place because we think that blogspam will become a major issue in the months and years to come.

Tags: blogs, internet