Monday, February 11, 2013

On Lack of Moderation of Comments on This Blog

The one (of 6) legitimate comments to a recent post says:

Uhh. Whatever happened to moderated comments? I used to come to this blog for insightful posts, AND DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS.


No longer, in the second aspect (I still read very interesting blog posts!). Instead, in the comments section, I see almost entirely spam-like "comments" having nothing to do with the post, and pushing some other website or other.

And the interesting comments only seem to come to surface because Dr. Brody knows the commenter.

What's up with this?

Here's what's up. When I started this blog in 2007, there was very little problem with spam comments. I accordingly created the blog with rather generous settings to allow comments simply to go up without prescreening. (I can, if I wished, allow no comments at all, or require that I approve all comments before they appear.)

The volume of spam comments has since become immense. When I just now logged on, I had a stack of 69 comment awaiting my review, all of them spam so far as I could tell. (I am asked to review any comments that show up for posts that are older than a certain specified limit.)

If I reset the blog settings so that I moderated all comments before they went up, I am frankly not sure where I'd find the time to do the blog. I have a more-than-full-time job and manage to do this blog only in odd moments. As I trust is abundantly clear, I make no profit off any aspect of the blog. Blogspot has some sort of spam filter which is supposed to weed out the worst automatically but as you can tell, these low-lifes are adept at finding ways around it. Exactly what is in it for them, to get their links posted in a comment where it is virtually guaranteed that no one will click on them, escapes me, unless they somehow get paid extra for everyplace on the Internet that their link appears.

I'll try to police more recent entries more carefully in the future to eliminate spam comments. Meanwhile, my apologies to the serious readers who would like to see this plague depart.

ADDENDUM 2/11: After publishing the above post I went and checked the comments for the last 5-6 posts, and I note that compared to the last time that I did this, the Blogspot automatic spam filter is apparently letting a lot more of the obviously spam comments slip thru. I appreciate Anonymous calling this to my attention and promise to work harder in the future to police this.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might try wordpress . Com. They seem to have a much better filter. And the blog is free as long as you agree to their conditions.

Your blog also won't let me post with my name and URL. I will try to put the URL in the comment.

Jparpaiamd.net. This is a very low key wordpress blog

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chicago dentist said...

i think it is hard to filter the comments on your own. i do agree with you that nobody would be clicking those links if their primary purpose is to read and interact with the other readers. it is mainly on the conscience of those spammers if they post nonsense things or not.