28/10: Comments welcome?
Category: Internet and Technology
Posted by: SaltyAdmin
One of the "nice" features about blogging, bulletin board and CMS software is that they allow visitors to a website to comment on the content... possibly providing some additional information useful to other visitors, engaging in a debate, or simply passing on a 'thanks' to the website creator.
One of the incentives for visitors to take the effort to add a post is that they can add a link to their own site within it (thus potentially boosting their site's google ranking). This small reward for posting comments has been sadly (but inevitably) exploited/abused by the spammers who post comments including links to literally hundreds of different porn/viagra/gambling websites - with the effect of annoying genuine site visitors, lowering the blog site's ranking (due to the massive increase in outbound links) and ultimately driving traffic away from the the blog.
There are several ways to deal with this:
1. Use a blogging tool that provides a comment filtering tool (or has one available as a plug-in)
2. Manually review all comments before they are published (or soon after)
3. Restrict comment posting to registered members (and use some means of identifying these as real people rather than one of a legion of zombie PCs out there)
4. Turn off comments
5. Bury your head in a bucket of sand and hope the spammers leave you alone!
Large organisations like the BBC (which allows readers to post comments on news stories etc) apply a combination of these approaches - using a filter to remove the obvious spam or offensive material, and a team of editors to review the rest before it is published. Bulletin boards with an active community of regular users typically have a few users that are granted moderators who can remove unwanted posts and ban serial offenders.
However, for smaller organisations the safest option is "4. Turn off comments". Having just deleted over 500 spam comments on this website, it is with regret that we have to inform you that you will no longer be able to comment on Salty's Nuts (... maybe that's a good thing!)
One of the incentives for visitors to take the effort to add a post is that they can add a link to their own site within it (thus potentially boosting their site's google ranking). This small reward for posting comments has been sadly (but inevitably) exploited/abused by the spammers who post comments including links to literally hundreds of different porn/viagra/gambling websites - with the effect of annoying genuine site visitors, lowering the blog site's ranking (due to the massive increase in outbound links) and ultimately driving traffic away from the the blog.
There are several ways to deal with this:
1. Use a blogging tool that provides a comment filtering tool (or has one available as a plug-in)
2. Manually review all comments before they are published (or soon after)
3. Restrict comment posting to registered members (and use some means of identifying these as real people rather than one of a legion of zombie PCs out there)
4. Turn off comments
5. Bury your head in a bucket of sand and hope the spammers leave you alone!
Large organisations like the BBC (which allows readers to post comments on news stories etc) apply a combination of these approaches - using a filter to remove the obvious spam or offensive material, and a team of editors to review the rest before it is published. Bulletin boards with an active community of regular users typically have a few users that are granted moderators who can remove unwanted posts and ban serial offenders.
However, for smaller organisations the safest option is "4. Turn off comments". Having just deleted over 500 spam comments on this website, it is with regret that we have to inform you that you will no longer be able to comment on Salty's Nuts (... maybe that's a good thing!)
