paragiraffe

If you don’t have a blog, and especially a Movable Type (MT) blog, you may want to skip this post. A lot of people seem to be having big problems with comment spam, while I seem to have virtually none. I thought I could share some tips that don’t involve hacks or plugins or renaming anything.

Things you can do to curb comment spam

1. Turn off commenting on old entries. This is crucial. CRUCIAL. Comment spammers seem to target old entries, because you are less likely to notice the comments are there. When I make a new entry, I immediately turn off comments on the post that has “fallen” off the main page. You can use CloseComments or the like to do this, but I just do it through the interface; It takes two seconds, and it rebuilds the archive page so the comment form doesn’t even show up. If you have a ton of entries with open comments, that’s a little harder. If you’re familiar with MySQL you can do it very quickly there, else you’ll have to do them all individually (sorry!) or use a plugin.

2. Have comment notifications emailed to you. I love LOVE this feature. If you’re being spammed on old entries, you may not notice on your site, but you’ll definitely notice if you get an email about it. Additionally, I like it because I can reply to (legitimate) comments by email. One note, though: Gmail is smart enough to mark notifications of comment spam AS spam, so check your spam folder as well. Then, for the love of God, delete the spam comment! Spam comments on your site breed more spam comments. MT 3.x has a much better interface for handling/deleting comments.

3. Keep your MT install current. This is a little more difficult, as it involves FTPing and stuff, but really, it’ll take five minutes, and it’s completely worth it. There are even instructions. If this is too much for you, look into Blogger or possibly TypePad.

4. Post often. Like I said, spammers seem to target older entries, and if they’re still hanging around on your main page, all the better. If you’re only posting once a week (or less), you’re basically asking for it: popular but infrequently updated blogs seem to be a prime target (Emma is a perfect example). Also, at the risk of offending some (don’t take this personally), if you’re updating less than once or twice a week, why do you have a blog?

5. As kind of a combination of 1 and 4, I only have three entries on my main page. It’s less to keep up with, and rarely is anything more than a couple of days old. Someone may stumble upon my site and want to comment on something I said last week, and they won’t be able to, but I’ll live.

Things you can do to curb comment spam but I don’t and why

1. Get the plugin for the famed nofollow tag. I have to be honest: I see this being about as effective as MT’s incredibly annoying comment URL redirect.

2. Rename your mt-comments.cgi script. In theory, this works, but the new script name is still listed in your HTML, and the smarter spammers will find it. If they haven’t already, they will.

3. Use TypeKey authentication. I’m not a fan of this, because if you make it hard for people to comment, they won’t. This is why I hate Blogger‘s comment system.

4. Use comment moderation. This is actually not a bad idea, although it involves more work on the blogger’s part. I guess it depends on how many comments you get.

5. Use another CMS. This is up to you. I’m not likely to because I’m crazy. See, I’m a PHP programmer, AND I’m anal. CMSs are, by nature, somewhat inelegant, and with MT, I don’t really notice because I’m less familiar with Perl. Wordpress and Textpattern are written in PHP, and I’d just drive myself crazy tinkering with them. Plus, I like the way MT generates the actual (and generally search engine-friendly) pages for the entries.

I truly hope this helps you a little. Let me know if you have any other tips.

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