Friday, September 26, 2008<\/p>\n
\n So, you’ve set up a forum on your site for the first time, or enabled comments on your blog. You
\n carefully craft a post or two, click the submit button, and wait with bated breath for comments
\n to come in.\n<\/p>\n
\n And they do come in. Perhaps you get a friendly note from a fellow blogger, a pressing update from \n Comment spam is bad stuff all around. It’s bad for you, because it adds to your workload. It’s bad So what can you, as a webmaster, do about it?<\/p>\n \n A quick disclaimer: the list below is a good start, but not exhaustive. There are so many \n Take the time to keep your software up-to-date and pay special attention to important security \n You may need to strike a balance on which tactics you choose to implement depending on your blog \n As a long-time blogger and web developer<\/a> Friday, September 26, 2008 So, you’ve set up a forum on your site for the first time, or enabled comments on your blog. You carefully craft a post or two, click the submit button, and wait with bated breath for comments to come in. And they do come in. Perhaps you get a friendly note […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"menu_order":85852,"template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"ar_kb_kategori":[665],"ar_kb_etiket":[],"class_list":["post-24035","ar_kb","type-ar_kb","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ar_kb_kategori-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ar_kb\/24035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ar_kb"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/ar_kb"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ar_kb\/24035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"ar_kb_kategori","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ar_kb_kategori?post=24035"},{"taxonomy":"ar_kb_etiket","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alienroad.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ar_kb_etiket?post=24035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n an MMORPG guild member, or a reminder from your Aunt Millie about dinner on Thursday. But then you
\n get something else. Something… disturbing. Offers for deals that are too good to be true,
\n bizarre logorrhean gibberish, and explicit images you certainly don’t want Aunt Millie to see.
\n You are now buried in a deluge of dreaded
\n comment spam<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n
\n for your users, who want to find information on your site and certainly aren’t interested in dodgy
\n links and unrelated content. It’s bad for the web as a whole, since it discourages people from
\n opening up their sites for user-contributed content and joining conversations on existing forums.\n<\/p>\n
\n different blog, forum, and bulletin board systems out there that we can’t possibly provide
\n detailed instructions for each, so the points below are general enough to make sense on most
\n systems.\n<\/p>\nMake sure your commenters are real people<\/h2>\n
\n
\n prove they’re a human being and not an automated script. If your blog or forum system doesn’t
\n have CAPTCHAs built in you may be able to find a plugin like
\n Recaptcha<\/a>, a project which also helps
\n digitize old books. CAPTCHAs are not foolproof but they make life a little more difficult for
\n spammers.
\n You can read more about the many different types of CAPTCHAS<\/a>,
\n but keep in mind that just adding a simple one can be fairly effective.\n <\/li>\n
\n often find plugins to look for excessive traffic from individual IP addresses or proxies and
\n other activity more common to bots than human beings.\n <\/li>\n<\/ul>\nUse automatic filtering systems<\/h2>\n
\n
\n in their comments so this isn’t a very scalable solution, but it can keep blatant spam at bay.\n <\/li>\n
\n automated methods to besmirch your site, so why not use an automated system to defend yourself?
\n Comprehensive systems like
\n Akismet, which has plugins for many blogs and forum systems<\/a>
\n and TypePad AntiSpam<\/a>, which is
\n open-source and compatible with Akismet, are easy to install and do most of the work for you.\n <\/li>\n
\n require some effort on your part, but this technique
\n has been used successfully to fight email spam<\/a>.\n <\/li>\n<\/ul>\nMake your settings a bit stricter<\/h2>\n
\n
nofollow<\/code><\/a>
\n untrusted links. Many systems have a setting to add a nofollow<\/code> attribute to the
\n links in comments, or do so by default. This may discourage some types of spam, but it’s
\n definitely not the only measure you should take.\n <\/li>\n
\n the user experience and may discourage some casual visitors from posting comments, but may keep
\n the signal-to-noise ratio higher as well.\n <\/li>\n
\n is a great tactic if you want to hold comments to a high standard, don’t expect a lot of
\n comments, or have a small, personal site. You may be able to allow employees or trusted users
\n to approve posts themselves, spreading the workload.\n <\/li>\n
\n very old posts that are unlikely to get legitimate comments. On blogs you can often disable
\n trackbacks and pingbacks, which are very cool features but can be major avenues for automated
\n spam.\n <\/li>\n<\/ul>\nKeep your site up-to-date<\/h2>\n
\n updates. Some spammers take advantage of security holes in older versions of blogs, bulletin
\n boards, and other content management systems. Check the
\n Quick Security Checklist<\/a>
\n for additional measures.\n<\/p>\n
\n or bulletin board software, your user base, and your level of experience. Opening up a site for
\n comments without any protection is a big risk, whether you have a small personal blog or a huge
\n site with thousands of users. Also, if your forum has been completely filled with thousands of
\n spam posts and doesn’t even show up in Google searches, you may want to
\n submit a reconsideration request<\/a>
\n after you clear out the bad content and take measures to prevent further spam.\n<\/p>\n
\n myself, I can tell you that a little time spent setting up measures like these up front can save
\n you a ton of time and effort later. I’m new to the Webmaster Central team, originally from
\n Cleveland. I’m very excited to help fellow webmasters, and have a passion for usability and
\n search quality (I’ve even done
\n a bit of academic research<\/a>
\n on the topic). Please share your tips on preventing comment and forum spam in our
\n forum<\/a>, and as
\n always you’re welcome to ask questions in our
\n discussion group<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n