Tightening the net

While the blogging cat was away, the spamming mice were at play. The cat has returned.

I was busy for most of the past week entertaining our young nieces, who spent some of their summer holidays with us. That, and a few other things that needed doing meant little time for blogging.

Nevertheless, I kept managing the spam queue until the end of last week when I didn’t even have time for that. The image with this post shows the spam comments that were posted to my previous post. The reason these were posted is that Blogger’s spam filters didn’t see the comments as spam, and because it was a new post, they weren’t held in the moderation queue, either.

All up, when I checked today there were 12 comments held for moderation—all of them spam. All up, there were 283 spam comments, which is actually pretty light for what was probably three days accumulation.

So, I’ve now drastically shortened the amount of time comments are unmoderated, a change that would have prevented all the spam comments being posted. If too many spam comments still get through, I’ll turn on moderation for all comments.

I said in my previous post that Blogger’s spam filters aren’t nearly as good as Akismet, which is a bit of an understatement. But the whole way comments are handled on Wordpress (self-hosted Wordpress blogs, anyway) is so much better than the way Blogger does it. For example, when someone has a comment approved on my Wordpress sites, future comments are no longer held in moderation. On Blogger, all comments are held for moderation, no matter how often someone comments. That’s just dumb. Also, it’s possible to edit comments on Wordpress, such as, removing links. Blogger’s moderation and spam queues don’t even show links.

I know that this is all very meta, but I think that bloggers should share some of the more technical things they do, too, because you never know when information about something we’ve tackled will prove useful information to someone else.

Normally, I wouldn’t do two posts in a row on this subject. But since I wanted to publicly announce that full comment moderation is on the way, I decided I may as well talk about the behind-the-screen activity that made this inevitable.