I want to confess something to you.
It’s not easy for me but I have to break a promise.
Eight months ago, I shared three strategies to keep me writing comments on your blog. I told you that blogs requiring registration or moderation, or preventing email notification of follow-up comments, were no no’s to me.
Many people added comments to the conversation and the biggest conflict was over moderation. David Bradley, in particular, complained about a rise in Russian spammers who cleverly maneuvered around the wonderful Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress–and were the impetus for complete moderation on his science blog.
Kim Woodbridge, in a Twitter conversation with me today, shared her policy of moderating the first two comments before authorizing the person to post more comments moderation-free.
Cognizant of an abnormal increase of bypassed Akismet spam protection this week, my neurons clicked.
Such is a dilemma every blogger faces at some point.
For the first time in my five years of blogging–and two years since writing about social media and online marketing–I’ve decided to emulate Kim, go back on my November 2008 thoughts, and commence moderation.
I’ve also turned off comments on all blog posts older than 180 days–another indicator of potential spammers who may think older content has greater SEO properties.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
I moderate comments much the way Kim does. Because I focus on law enforcement and don’t get to my blog every single day, the last thing I’d want is abuse up there before I get a chance to delete it. (Spam goes without saying.) I think your reasons are sound!
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Yeah, it’s amazing how much crapola I deleted after 24 hours. Now, how come your comment added without being moderated?
I was wondering the same thing! Was my previous comment to the blog soon enough for the system to recognize me?
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I have a fairly new blog and moderating comments seemed like a lot of work. Just wondering what draws spammers to particular blogs. I thought if my blog was small and only visited by a few hundred people per week–that would not be considered an upcoming or popular blog. After reading this article, I’ll have to give some thought to how to handle comments. I don’t get many comments at this point, but I can see reasons why moderating would be a good idea.
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I also think your reasons behind this are sound, these russian spammers ruined a few of my blogs with unrelevant comments, its nice to see people working this way.
William
This is no lie. I just posted “Deconstructing Comment Moderation.” Then I read your post. I agree with everything you say.
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When the blog becomes really big that there are always readers that come back, then I think it’s a huge time waster to moderate every single comment.
I put my settings in such a way that after the first time I have approved a comment, all other comments are automatically approved. This helps me weed out the spammers right in the beginning ( only having to see who that person is once.) That helps go down in comment moderation time and when we have so many things to tend to online this is, in my opinion, the best option.
But each blogger has to figure out what’s their best option which depends on their individual goals.
All the best,
Eren Mckay
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Ari, you may also find it helpful, since this is a self-hosted Wordpress blog, to install a plugin that deals with spam bots – those automated comments that sometimes seem to sneak past Askimet, which may very well be the source of your sudden flurry of spam comments. I’ve had good results on spam-attacked blogs with the fairly powerful WP-Spamfree from Scott Allen at Hybrid6.com, but I’m sure there are other similar plugins that would do a good job for you, too. Hope this helps!
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Thanks for the tip!
I believe that any bloggers MUST moderate the comments on their blog for two reasons. First, the obvious: if you leave your comments open for anyone to take advantage of, you’ll get spammed like never before. Secondly, successful on-page SEO depends on the relevance of the comments. Comments like “thanks for the tip” can be relevant to, like, 90% of blogs out there and those comments will do nothing for your on-page SEO. You want to approve comments from people eho have taken the time to actually read the blog and comment on its contents. It’s quid pro quo: They scratch your back with a relevant comment, you scratch theirs with an approved comment and, essentially, a back link to their website.
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Hey Ari,
Moderation has always been in the “must for a blog” list of mine. There’s no doubt that with this you can tap the quality comments to appear on your blog which indeed increases the trust of the readers in your blog and this is the sole factor that is essential for a blog’s survival.
We had such a hard time moderating the comments on one of our sites that we decided to build a product that would make things easier. It’s just a simple desktop application that works like an instant messaging client. Every time someone posts a new comment on your blog it pops a message to let you know, so that you can approve it or withdraw it immediately.
Comments are getting spammier and spammier with each passing day..I delete almost 20 spam comments on a single blog a day..
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Ari, I’m a new comer to blogging, and came across this post while I was searching for information on how to moderate comments. I was thinking in terms of friends who make a brief comment on-topic and then go off-topic into what is really a personal letter. I wondered if their were generally established views on whether that was good or bad, and whether I should edit out the off-topic sections.
Anyway, as regards Akismet and your problems with spam, may I suggest you try a free plug-in called Bad Behavior (exact spelling) if you haven’t already. I came across it in a book called “Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read” by Scott McNulty. He rates it as a plug-in no blog should be without. To put it in context, he devotes 5 pages of the book to Akismet, and only one paragraph to Bad Behavior. Essentially, Akismet puts comments that it thinks are spam in the Spam Queue. Bad Behavior stops automated robot comment spam from being left in the first place.
I think it is smart Ari. I moderate around 20 blogs for SEO clients, and the amount of comment spam is massive and you don’t want people to be able to abuse your website and take away some link value or get you to link to a bad neighborhood.
I may have given the impression in my comment above that Bad Behavior is an alternative to Akismet. To the contrary, it is intended to be run in combination with it.
To quote the author, in part:
Bad Behavior is a PHP-based solution for blocking link spam and the robots which deliver it.
Instead of merely looking at the content of potential spam, Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method as well as the software the spammer is using. In this way, Bad Behavior can stop spam attacks even when nobody has ever seen the particular spam before.
Bad Behavior is designed to work alongside existing spam prevention services to increase their effectiveness and efficiency.
You know Ari, I actually posted about this today on my site. Your article has given me lots of food for thought and I feel you have made lots of important points. In fact, I really wish I’d read it prior to posting my own blog post! – iluvcarz78.
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