Blog Comments More Trouble Than They Are Worth?
So I just switched this blog over to a new system that will accept reader comments on any post. I did this 4 days ago. So far, I have receieved 1 user comment and about 180 spam comments. The first two blocks of 60 spam comments went straight up on to the board. I got email notification (120 emails!) and removed them a few hours later. I then activated spam filtering on the comments, so the next group of 60 never made it to the live site. I still had to delete them, though. Plus the 60 emails. Good thing I can use MySQL directly and delete them with one command, otherwise I would have had to use the admin interface to delete each one individually.
I can’t beleive that it is this bad. I’ve just this year gotten my email spam under control by using Spam Assassin, my client’s filtering and a few other techniques. But now I have to put up with deleting 60 emails + posts a day in order to have comments on my blog! I’m going to try some ‘clever’ solutions, like changing the names of the comment submission form input fields and such. But if this keeps up, I guess I will go back to a no-comment blog here.