Deterring spam on my weblog

Mar 16, 2006

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Recently, I started getting spam on my weblog, and I decided to take some measures to deter their senders while still enabling comments from legitimate commenters.

First, I banned the IP address that left 79 unwelcome comments over 2 days on the entry Tagging life goals . Second, I changed my weblog config preferences so that commenters are required to provide a name and email address to post a comment. I’m going to monitor this and see if this is enough of a deterrent. If not, I may require all commenters to use a valid TypeKey id. I feel bad that I’m adding this extra step for people I do want to hear from, but I don’t like email notifications for spam comments on my blog eating up my precious disk usage on my OISE FirstClass email account!

I noticed Chris doesn’t allow comments (which is too bad, because he blogs about really neat things), and a while back, Doug blogged about not allowing comments because of the trackback spam he was getting (ironically, see for e.g. his entry called Trackback spam).

I’m hoping that I won’t have to turn off the commenting feature entirely.

Comments

One response to “Deterring spam on my weblog”

Doug

March 20, 2006

Hi Nobuko,

Thanks for the reminder about trackback spam. I’ve since turned off comments and trackbacks for my blog here at OISE/UT. I don’t have the time resources (i.e., time) to maintain the site given the amount of spam-like &*^% that ends up linked to my posts.

I’ve just spent the last while removing about 1100 nefarious track-backs to my posts on my OISE/UT blog. I have to say that the MT interface really doesn’t make it easy to maintain. I’m most likely missing something, but it seems as though one needs to Ban the IP and then go back and delete the offending comment.

I’ve turned off comments and trackbacks due to the fact that I don’t have the time required to adequately monitor the growing onslaught of crap that seems to be part of life on today’s web.

Indeed, spam has the potential to choke the life out of the web like so much algae in a lake, and interfaces will need to get better at allowing management of comments/trackbacks if they are to survive.

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Deterring spam on my weblog

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One response to “Deterring spam on my weblog”

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