Wednesday, November 25, 2009

A warning on comments

Folks, I'm seeing a general up-tick in the number of spam comments making it through the CAPTCHA here over the last few weeks. It's only been about one comment a day, so I can keep manually erasing them when they happen, but if the frequency picks up much more beyond that, I may decide to turn on Comment Moderation (which would mean that all comments would be "held" until I get 'round to publishing them). I'll make that announcement if it becomes necessary, but there it is.

By the way, I've also noticed something that Will Duquette noticed: occasional spam comments that are actually "on topic", and only include a commercial link either in their signature or at the end. For my purposes, unless you're someone I know trying to point out a product or website that may be germane to a specific post, I will assume that any comment containing an obviously commercial link is a spam comment and delete it. My decision's a bit more Draconian than Will's, but he's probably nicer than I am, anyway.

For more information, see my official comments policy.

2 comments:

PALGOLAK said...

*Don't do it!*

Once you start moderating comments, THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON!

Roger Owen Green said...

I have comment moderation on all my websites except Ramblin', which seems to do it automatically on older posts. And I'm getting lots of spam lately. they seem to single out one or two posts, and and since I get e-mail notifications, I delete them easily. Still it takes about 10 minutes a day; but I figure comment moderation would take as long.