Your Blog and Spam Comments

If you have a blog and you allow comments to your posts, you might want to consider moderating the comments. With a blog hosted by Blogger, for example, if you have only a few comments weekly, this is manageable. Normally.

However, the past 24 hours I have been dealing with "spam" comments.

In my case, any comments awaiting approval and subsequent posting, come into my email box. I open them, read them, and then "publish" them.

Again, however, over the past 24 hours I have spent much too much time marking over 2 dozen "comments" as "spam." These are not approved and will never appear on my blog.

Why? - Because they are not legitimate comments.

There are two things which make these stand out and easy to block from posting.

First, they never, ever really refer to anything in the post they want to attach to. They might say some glowing things about the writing, or about the clarity of thought, or any of a dozen other things. But they never truly say a single word that is specific to that post.

Second, they always, ALWAYS contain a link to another site, which again, has nothing to do with my post. 

In the case of these two dozen "comments," they almost all contained a link supposedly to an arthritis glove site. However, if you hover over the link, and look at the bottom of your screen, you can see that even that is not legitimate.

No, I never check the sites listed because they are obviously not connected to what they say they are connected to.

The worst part of all of this is the bother. I must open each and every email, read the "comment," to be sure it is not a legitimate comment and therefore publishable. Then I must click to "spam" mark it. Then I must still delete the email itself.

I am tired of playing their silly game this time around.

I remember a dear internet friend of mine who has a blog. A year or so ago, she was irate about the same type of thing - except she was dealing with almost a hundred spam comments, if I remember correctly.

 
So, a word to the wise. To avoid accidentally posting a bunch of phony comments to your blog, if your host permits it, and if you do not normally get tons of these a week, moderate them. You don't want your readers to accidentally click on one of these phony or decoy links and perhaps invite trouble into their  computers.