Taskforce Blog Comment Spam
I love that the MLA has a Taskforce for exploring the potential uses of social software. I love that the Taskforce has a blog. The blog is always worth reading, so I subscribe to its feed. Because I don’t want to miss any part of the conversation, I also subscribe to the comments feed.
Of the last fourteen comments to appear in my aggregator from the comments feed, nine were spam. That’s more than 60%.
To illustrate this, here’s a screen capture from my aggregator where I’ve marked the comment spam:
These spam comments don’t appear to be on the taskforce site itself, so it appears that the taskforce does a good job of deleting these soon after they appear- but anyone subscribed to the comments feed still has to deal with them.
Here’s how the taskforce can eliminate comment spam from being left in the first place:
- Log in to WordPress as an administrator and go to Options > Discussion. Select these two options:
- If it isn’t already turned on, turn on Akismet (free, easy-to-use, comes built-in to newer versions of WordPress).
That’s it. Moderating comments is quick and easy, especially if the taskforce sets up the blog to have multiple administrators who can approve the comments of legitimate first-time commenters in timely manner.
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November 12th, 2007 at 11:06 am
I’ve been running my blog for 1.5 years and I’ve had near zero spams get Spam Karma it is all you need to protect your wordpress blog.
http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/