Comment Spam

A while ago, I turned off the commenting feature on this blog because I was hit by a lot of spam. I thought I'd give it a week or so and turn the feature on again, but I've just seen that my posts have been inundated by this junk.


Why me? It's strange - I really didn't think a blog like this would merit such attention. Or perhaps this blog comment spamming is now being done by bots? Anyway, I've turned off the commenting feature, which makes me a little sad, because it's one of the best things about blogging. It's actually ironic that I don't have a problem now with email spam - my gmail account has really worked wonders and I never get any spam.



So, my proposal is for any would-be-want-to-comment-people to send me an email and I'll attach your comments to the end of my posts. As I never get that many comments anyway, this seems like the easiest way to fix this problem. Unless any of you out there have any bright ideas...



Update 17/10/2005: Thanks for the bright ideas...




Graham, Sergei and Michael all suggested that it might be enough to turn on the word activation system in Blogger. They all suggested that this system will deal with the spam from bots at least. I've decided to try this out - if I get more spam, I'll turn the comments off though as I really don't have the time to eliminate them (I received about 60 spam comments the last time, and I still haven't erased them all).



Thanks also to Cleve, for the link to the post Turning off blog comments, which talks about why people might take the decision to turn off blog comments. It's not just about comment spam - some people turn off comments just because dealing with them take up a lot of time.