14 November 2009

Counteracting spam by limiting comments

This kind of crap has been showing up on posts on the blog. Comments for this blog do not require prescreening, but they all do come to my emailbox for review, so on some mornings I have to wade through a dozen of these
...i want to thank you for your work. You have done really very good site. Great work, great site! Thank you!

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Sorry for offtopic
Some mornings I will find that same entry on ten different posts dating back over the past two years. And then I have to individually go to each post where the crap was posted and manually delete it. It's a pain in the cyberbutt and I just don't have time for this anymore.

So I'm switching the comment system on the blog to require registration. For the moment I'm not going to require the retyping of a "captcha" image to screen out bots - but that will be the next step if necessary.

Please understand that I am NOT making the switch to squeeze out those who in the past have posted as "anonymous." Many of those comments have been outstanding, and I fully understand that some people prefer not to use any system to register. But this spam has gotten to be too much of a hassle. I'm "Minnesota-nice," but I just can't take it any more.

8 comments:

  1. I understand completely. My wife has seen the same thing on her blog (and I'm the one who usually wades through the comments for her)

    It's too bad, because, for the most part, the 'annon' posters have been pretty civilized.

    Keep up the great posts!

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  2. Yeah, it's certainly not hard to understand. I would have shut off anonymous comments the _first_ time I had to delete comments spanning two years.

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  3. I absolutely hate registration, however not as much as I hate spam. I totally support you in doing what is right for your blog.

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  4. I understand. I have a Google account now. I really think it's much better for people to use a name rather than "Anonymous".

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  5. You have my sympathy, the same odious cretins have plagued me in the past, I hate them, and aim evil voodoo curses in their direction.

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  6. OK. I registered. I am now The Author Formerly Known As Pom.

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  7. Great. I understand some other old-timers are having problems with the Google system. Hoping for the best...

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  8. I recommend OpenID, it let me use a mailinator.com address so my real identity has now been registered exactly nowhere.

    ReplyDelete