RE: Blogs and Comments

I'm in much the same situation as Jeff.  The comments feature is valuable,
but the spammers have become so prolific that it's not worth it.  Deleting
the spams seems to take me more than the 10-15 minutes a day he mentions.
Perhaps partly because I'm operating multiple blogs, it's just too
burdensome.

Does TypePad have any built-in anti-comment spam features?  I had been
thinking about moving some existing blogs over there anyway.

Movable Type ver. 3.0 is an interim version, for developers.  The "mass
consumption" ver. 3.0 is not available yet.

Has anyone installed the third-party Movable Type plug-ins that Jeff
mentions, and if so, with what results?

Jerry Lawson
http://www.netlawblog.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: jjbeard-sxCt/[email protected] [mailto:jjbeard-sxCt/[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 1:08 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [NetLawyers] Blogs and Comments

Well, I for one, can commiserate with Mr. Drum re: maintaining a blog with
open comments.  Comment spam is a very serious and time-consuming problem
for me -- mostly because I haven't had the time to devote to implementing
one of the third-party Movable Type plugins for closing open comments.

I can corroborate his relative threshold of 10-20K readers, at least as
measured by "visits" per month or perhaps "pages served" per month in my
site's Webalizer log reports.  Once my blog crossed that threshold some
months ago, I started getting comment spam.  Now that it is well over that
threshold, I'm deluged with them.  In just a single day last week, my blog
got hit by over 75 spam comments.  Somewhat fortunately, many of them were
in multiples of 12 comments per post (obviously to manipulate the search
engines' "link voting"
logic), so it was easier to delete them in groups, but it was nasty.  It's
sad to say that it's currently easier for me to find the 10-15 mins a day to
delete them than it is to find larger chunks of time to devote to
implementing the solution (there are several Movable Type plugins which take
somewhat different approaches), although cumulatively I know I'll save much
more time in short order by doing the latter, so it'll probably end up as a
weekend project when the weather isn't so nice.

Many bloggers suffering from comment spam have noticed that the overwhelming
majority of posts getting spammed are ones that have been out there 30 days
or more.  Conversely, the posts getting valid comments from interested
readers are usually made in the first week (or two at most) after posting.
So one of the most effective solutions is to have an automated way to close
all comments after X number of days of posting.

Like others, I have thought about eliminating the comment feature, but it
has value both to myself and my blog's readers.  Sometimes, someone will
point us to an alternative, new, or better solution/product that we wouldn't
have found on our own.  Having comments open on my "great RSS vs. Atom
debate" posts earlier this year allowed influential people like Dave Winer
to add his thoughts.  This in turn generated very spirited discussion and
debate by other influential posters and my blog traffic and readership
spiked as a direct result.  Nice win-win.

And naturally, on the downside, that's also about the same time I got nailed
and continue to get nailed by the comment spam.  So it's really in my corner
to automate closing the old comments, which I know is doable with some extra
time investment for my version of Movable Type.  I'm the one leaving the
comment door open right now, because my time has been preoccupied by my
recent career advancement and relocation.

But I thought you might appreciate the perspective of someone a bit closer
to home.

Jeff Beard
Legal Services IT Manager
Caterpillar Inc.
100 NE Adams Street
Peoria, IL 61629-6490
(309) 675-4889 (Phone)
(309) 675-1236 (Fax)
jjbeard-2nPbLGRuc/[email protected]
www.lawtechguru.com (Blog)




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