Especially ones who really work at it? Had one person do six spammy comments today. Folks, this is why I moderate comments - you never know what people are going to try to put in your blog comments. I guess this guy figured if I didn’t notice, that would be six places with multiple links to his site. Probably works some places.
I have quite a busy weekend ahead of me. Birthday party Friday, probably going to my sister’s on Saturday, then another birthday party on Sunday. It’s going to be a lot of fun, but I’m looking forward to a nice, quiet Monday.
Must be spam day. My forums had a lot of spam this morning to… not the same sites so far as I could tell.
Unfortunately there is a lot of software around at the moment which enables you to spam thousands of blogs and/or forums at the press of a button. As you say though it is simple to avoid by moderating all comments. Also with forums make sure people have to register to submit posts.
I have more trouble with spam emails these days, I would hate to know how many hours a day I waste deleting spam mail.
One other thing that I don’t think a lot of people know is that the more comments a post has the higher it will rank in the search engines. Therefore you shouldn’t be too strict on which comments you allow. Also another of the main reasons we allow comments is to enable visitors to add content.
All the best…
Trust me, I’m not strict, except on flat out spam. The stuff I’ve been deleting is adult, pharmacy and gambling spam, often with a dozen or more links (I don’t count the links, I just delete the comments when it’s that bad). Scarcely value added to my blog; in fact I would say such things seriously take away from it.
Fortunately, I am getting it under control, as I have set Wordpress up to automatically delete obvious spam comments; those with the standard keywords for the aforementioned topics. They just aren’t at all likely to come up in conversation here naturally.
I am curious about your comment on search engines preferring posts with lots of comments. Any references on that? In either case, I don’t think they’d rank a post with tons of obvious spam that well, and even if they did I wouldn’t allow it.