Best Way to Have Quality Comments Only?
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I love reading the comments on each article I post. If you leave one, you’re near guaranteed I’ll reply to you directly and keep the conversation going.
The trouble is that after a day or two of an article being live, the spammers descend and the lovely, informative comment thread descends into “great article, agree with your points, visit my site”. It’s just not cool…
We’re working on a full redesign to Pro Blog Design, and one of the things I’m most interested in is this comments issue. How can I make sure the comment threads stay in that awesome-to-read stage from the first few days when an article is written?
In this post, I want to share some ideas, along with a quick look at their pros/cons, and I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think would work best? Would it put you off commenting?
Remove DoFollow
DoFollow means that after your 3rd comment here, the rel=”nofollow” will be removed from all of your comments, allowing Google to follow the links back to your site (Back in the day, showing off a badge like the one on the right designed by Randa was quite a source of pride for bloggers!)
Originally, I set this up as a way of saying thank you for commenting. Now though, it just attracts a lot of spam (Mostly with names like “Web Design Boston”). And it’s not just automated spam. The fact that people actively hunt down DoFollow blogs shows that they aren’t interested in the comment, just in the number of them they can leave.
I’m not saying that a lot of legit commenters don’t appreciate DoFollow, just that this seems to do more harm than good now.
Update (19/3/11): Steven Snell left a great comment about why removing this plugin may be too late. The damage is done by having it in the first place. Check it out.
Asking for Cooler Comments
This is an approach I’ve seen taken on some larger blogs like Tim Ferriss’. If you check out his comment form, you see this:
It’s simple, and in no way guaranteed, but it probably works. At the very least, when I see that as a commenter, it’s good to know that the blogger is at least trying to tackle the problem.
The downside is of course the added clutter on the page. Though if it’s useful, then maybe it isn’t clutter?
(Random aside: Tim’s interviews with people who started up their own profitable online “muses”, as he calls them, are some of the best reads you’ll find.)
CAPTCHAs
CAPTCHAs are those rather annoying scripts that ask you to enter the words in a scrambled image.
Akismet does well against the majority of automated spam, but a CAPTCHA may help prevent the rest of it. That said, when implementing Google’s own reCaptcha on a forum lately, it took less than 30 minutes for the first spammer to sign up anyway.
The real downside for me is the annoyance to valid users though. Sticking with my farming line; I don’t want to throw away the wheat as well as the chaff.
Prevent Certain Words in Names
The worst offenders (The ones who leave a dozen useless comments all over the site) usually use a name made up of keywords. You know the type; ‘mortgage loan’, ‘web design texas’, ‘pharmacy supplies’ etc.
Yesterday, someone actually left messages with the name “wart removal”. I sincerely hope that is not your real name.
By targeting a few common words (mortgage, design etc.) that shouldn’t be in any valid name, you could stop a lot of these comments being posted (No idea why Akismet doesn’t do this already?).
The simplest implementation would be with some jQuery. Not full-proof, but it would work on most real users (They won’t bother disabling JS for this. Speed is the main thing for them). Or we could look into doing the validation via WordPress itself (Knowing WordPress, it’s probably a matter of a few lines!).
(Let me know if you’d like me to look into this properly and put together a tutorial!)
Closing Comments after a While
The idea here is that after an article has been online a certain amount of time, the comments on it are closed automatically. It’s quite a popular technique on larger sites.
This makes a lot of sense if you stop checking the comments on your older posts (Like I usually do, it’s just unmanageable). People aren’t likely to get a reply, so you don’t want them wasting their time.
The downside for a technical blog like this is that tutorials can go out of date. It often takes a good comment from someone to point this out, or even to remind me that that tutorial exists and I ought to update it (Case in point, I really need to show you guys the not-so-new-anymore way to separate comments from trackbacks).
The question is, what time limit would you set this at?
Use a Reputation System (Disqus?)
Forums have been doing this for years to reward the best members (How many forums have you seen where you can “Thank” a post for being helpful?). Sites like Stack Overflow have improved this further, but the idea is the same. When your contributions add to your reputation, you put more effort into them.
One easy way of doing this would be to use Disqus. Comments are then added to a user’s Disqus profile, along with any +/- ratings it gets. As so many sites use Disqus now, you may be careful with boosting your rating.
The downside is that it’s not the easiest to style, and besides the rating being displayed next to your name, it doesn’t actually do anything.
An alternative would be a plugin like Comments Vote, that allow people to rate good or bad on comments, and comments with a negative rating are then collapsed.
Marking the Best Comments
The idea here would be that when I see a great comment, I’d mark it as being great. This could then allow a few things to happen:
- The comment’s design changes (Highlighted to stand out, similar to how an author’s comments are)
- The comment is displayed at the top of the list (So instead of just showing the first comment first, you’d show the best comment first).
- NoFollow could be removed again for these particular comments.
- Some sort of list of all “best comments” from across the site could be setup in your sidebar/footer.
I’m not aware of anything that works like this at the minute, though let me know if you are! If the idea seemed like it would work though, I’d be happy to code it (And release it to you too).
Would it encourage you to leave a comment?
Only Comment Via FB Connect and Twitter
Quora is ia Q&A site with extremely high quality answers to the questions. It’s not known for its easy sign-up though. Sometimes requiring an invite, but even when it didn’t, it very strongly encouraged you to sign up with Twitter or Facebook.
Your Facebook and Twitter profiles are something that you put a lot of time into and want to look good on. Are you less likely to write spammy one-liner comments when it’s all tied back to your Facebook Profile? Perhaps?
But then, is that asking too much of a casual commenter who does have something interesting to say, but isn’t sure about giving yet another site access to their personal profiles?
One interesting I only discovered while writing this post is that Techcrunch has jumped from Disqus to the Facebook Comments plugin. Obviously though, they’re dealing with this same issue but on a far bigger scale, so they can afford to turn away more casual commenters?
What Would You Do?
I’m very undecided on the best route to take. The ideas above range from being very restrictive (Limiting to Facebook only), to quite possibly worthless (Removing the DoFollow plugin).
So where is the balance in the middle? As someone who takes the time to leave comments here, what would you be happiest with (Or most put off by)? (And I promise I’ll reply to you before the spammers do…)
Enjoy this post? You should follow me on Twitter!
About the Author
Michael Martin
Michael Martin is the founder of Pro Blog Design. He works as a freelance web designer, loves WordPress, and has an unhealthy addiction to smilies.
Related Posts
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Don’t DoFollow. Get More Comments With CommentLuv
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10 Best Plugins To Get More Comments
7th January 2008
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How To Style Author Comments Differently
13th September 2007
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Separating Trackbacks from Comments
18th September 2007
First nice post admin.
lol – Damnit Alex!! :P
ha!
Informative Post.
We recently started a Blog and received lots of comments. Being new (naive) we were at first very trilled that our blog was being noticed. However after reading the ‘very complimentary comments, we checked out their links most of them linked to site that in now way related to the objective of our Blog. In that our objective was ‘plainly and at length described’ I was puzzled as to why these ‘idiots’’ would waste not only their time, but also even worst the opportunity that the Internet provides for providing and / or obtaining value information with others on like mind / kinder spirit.
Our method our limiting this fools form attacking our site has been just deleting or blocking them thru our email inbox (which is a pain time costly).
We can definitely take advantage of the information you’ve provided in this post.
Thanks
I am amazed! Such a nice picture!!!
hmm nice tips. thanks for share this. :)
Thanks for your tips, very helpful. I think the best way to have good comments is that you reply the comments as soon as you can to show that you appreciate your readers’ feedback… I found that really worked.
I also think that your idea of display the best comments on the footer is a cool one, perhaps I will think about it ;)
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I must agree very nice and informative post. Having quality comments does much to improve your site. Thank you.
I hate CAPTCHAs, I don’t comment if a CAPTCHA is needed because usually I need more than 1 try to get it right.
I don’t like the Facebook comments option, mostly because I don’t think that the blogs I visit are interesting to my old high school classmates.
Disqus is a great concept, but I don’t know if it is effective to obtain high quality comments, I guess the best option is to manually delete all the “Great article” comments, and closing comments makes sense with that option. When I see a lot of good comments, I feel like I should say something smart or at least somewhat elaborated.
Have to agree about the Captchas. I don’t mind them so much on long signup forms where it takes a while to fill out the form anyway, but not so good on a simple comment form :(
The problem with doing it manually is just the sheer scale of it here. Too many comments to go through (We have around 17,000 published comments here :( ). That said, if I disabled commenting on old posts, it would be doable.
I must agree with this captcha is like a “do not comment” sign due to a lot of lazeness, but you can use a sexy captcha that will produce the opposite, like this http://blog.lukeblackamore.com/2009/10/sexy-captcha-new-drag-and-drop-captcha.html
or some attractive question XD as a captcha
That’s very cool! Very nicely implemented, liking that a lot!
Wow that is a very cool Captcha, wow that just made my day! some people are so creative. I wonder how well something like that would work on a larger trafficked website.
Thanks Tarik
Excellent!!
I agree with you. Because I also find these most irritating problems.
Thank you for your thought!
The system you describe in “Marking the Best Comments” seems ideal to me, and would definitely encourage people to comment, rather in the way that the Stack Exchange network rewards people for providing good answers (and for accepting answers to questions).
Forcing users to use Twitter or Facebook would definitely cut down on spam, but honestly, I’m always a little turned by when I’m required to sign into with Twitter or Facebook in order to comment. Not good for the author when I’m a real person trying to leave a quality comment.
I liked that idea. May have to run with it and see how it goes. :)
I kind of agree about the enforced FB etc. It was interesting to see afterwards that Techcrunch is now doing this (Found out when I went to get a Disqus screengrab), but I guess they’re happy to cut out a lot of people. Big players can play the game differently, hmm… :(
I fully agree with your comment.
Thank you for your thought!
Great topic as comments, IMNSHO, can contribute to or take away from the quality of a site overall. This is one I bet lots of folks struggle with (and is an opportunity plugin developers). I hate weeding through comments that are just ego-strokes to get a link or a thinly veiled attempts at a link — so I made some decisions.
First was to close moderate all comments and 30 days comments are closed. I decided to do this to keep commentary current but it had the added benefit of less spammer options. When folks commented on a six month old conversation it generally was either spam, not on topic or link bait anyway. Doing this minimized allot of that.
I also am very persnickety as to what comments are approved. I’m into quality not quantity and state as much in a comment policy that I link to above the comments field. I had a bit of a statement like you mentioned above — didn’t make a difference.
It is common to get so wrapped up in getting comments or the number of comments that we miss the big picture — are those comments of value to other visitors?
Thanks for bringing this topic up, Michael!
Thanks for the really insightful comment Judith! It was really interesting to hear your experiences on this and how you’ve tried tackling it.
I have to be honest, I did find myself nodding in agreement when you talked about the benefits of closing comments on posts after a month. I think it would make it all more manageable, and like you said, cutting down spam just can’t be a bad thing.
The only thing that puts me off is that when I load a blog posts that’s old and I see the comments are closed, it just makes the whole page seem a little stale. There’s no discussion on it anymore, and following that, probably no updates to the content itself either.
That may be unfair to say though, I don’t know, e.g. if you loaded some of the old posts on this site, and saw the dozens of spammy comments at the end of it, that probably gives off the exact same impression, hmm… :(
Hi Michael
Looks as though Pro Blog Design is really up and running again.
What about the GASP anti spambot plugin – designed by Andy Bailey so it has a good pedigree.
Use it on my site.
Don’t get many spam comments but get lots of trackbacks – any suggestions on stopping those, other than turning trackbacks off?
BTW – Ireland were robbed by the Welsh and this weekend… may the best team win.
Hey Keith,
Haha, well, we’ll see! Just have to keep the stride going now. 2 articles a week is the goal, but I’ve not been good at that goal in the past. Still, going to give it a shot! :D
Thanks for mentioning the plugin. I hadn’t heard of it before, I’ll take a look! Sorry though, no real tips on the trackbacks. I have them disabled here, never really tried to use them anywhere.
And obviously captcha etc. won’t help.
I wonder if you could do anything with blacklisting certain key words? Are there any words that you find come up a lot in their titles?
(PS – Haha, you know more about this than I do! It’s St Paddy’s day here. The whole place has turned mental and green today! Guess theyre making up for the loss… :D )
You’ve still got Pagerank 5 so you aint doing so bad.
St Paddy’s day and Cheltenham… all you need now is the win over the English to give you the big three.
I read about GASP here
http://basicblogtips.com/gasp-wordpress-plugin.html
Got rid of Akismet and uploaded GASP.
No more trawling through spam comments for the odd genuine comment.
I’m subscribed so I’ll be able to check up on your two a week.
Haha, well, let’s see how it goes! Today’s the big day! :D
That’s impressive that it works so well even with Akismet off (Most spam tools still recommend keeping Akismet on, so you get the best of both). Will give it a look!
(And haha, thanks, you can pull me up on it if I fall behind! :P )
I would ( and probably should) turn off “do-follow. I would also (and have until recently) turn off comments after a certain period. I use four weeks. As a last resort if comments were really bad, I’d use captchas. I don’t do that now, but the turning off of comments seems to work well enough for me.
Thanks Mike, it’s great to hear what you’ve found effective. Glad to see that turning off comments after a while seems to be so effective. Why did you turn them back on though? Was it annoying readers?
The problem with these ideas is that the burden is on the readers. Captchas are annoying and a waste of time and not everybody has a FB or Twitter account. Asking for “cooler” comments is a smart thing but I doubt real spammer will follow it.
I usually delete the one-line useless comments “great write more” or “I agree”. They don’t bring anything and are usually spam. Closing the comments on old articles is something I considered but some of my old articles are for reference (such as “how to immigrate to Canada”) and pretty timeless. People still ask valuable questions about it.
The captchas definitely seem out. No-one has a good word to say about them, and I agree entirely with you there. :)
I know what you mean about not wanting to disable comments on all old posts. It would definitely be a shame on some articles, hmm… :(
I believe I need to apologize as I have left comments in my company name in the past.
With that out the way I would suggest closing comments after a set period, and adding some form of comment like/dislike system. The with CSS give greater visiual appearance to the well liked comments.
I hate CAPTCHA with all my heart.
Disqus is interesting, but difficult to style. I also dislike moving a piece of the site into a 3rd party platform that I didn’t have 100% control over.
The Facebook option is interesting too, but it might not solve your problem. We are going to see more and more malware and spam coming turlough Facebook from here on out.
No problem Michael, thanks for using your real name now though. I think I need to put up a message asking people to do that in general :)
I think we’re generally on the same page there. I prefer the less intrusive solutions. Barring entry to comments by using Facebook etc. does seem like it would be effective to me, but should be more of a last resort. I think there are better “middle grounds” to explore first.
great article, agree with your points, visit my site
lol :P
A tip: Cookies for Comments plugin for WP lets us specify a “comment stopwatch” along with the “allow comments to those who loads the cookie” feature. You set the stopwatch to 5 seconds and commenters will have to stay in the page for at least 5 seconds to post a comment, otherwise the comment’s not accepted.
It helps us to remove copy/paste commenters along with spam scripts.
Ah, that sounds very cool! Hadn’t heard of that plugin before, thank you!
This reminds me of a proposal from Bill Gates that would require all sent emails to solve a very difficult math problem, first.
He had suggested making it difficult enough to take 1-2 seconds. For the average user, this would be virtually unnoticeable. For a spammer, though, it would be a nightmare.
Great suggestion. Interesting thread. Thanks to you both.
What I don’t like is CAPTCHA and having to sign up through Facebook or Twitter. I don’t care whether the blog is DoFollow or not.
I don’t get many comments on my blog so I can deal with each one manually if needed. I use the default setup for WordPress where after the first moderated comment is approved, subsequent comments are not moderated, unless they contain more than one link in the body of the comment. This is how it looks:
Name (no product names)
Email (optional, will not be published)
Website
Obviously if you don’t leave an email, all your comments will be moderated because the email is the identifier. In my comments policy I also explain: “Use of a pseudonym is fine but product names in the name field are subject to being changed to Anon, Unknown, Guest, or your first name if it is available.”
In the extremely unlikely event that I get flooded with comments I agree I would have to change my policies. They way I do things now is the way I would like to be treated on blogs I want to comment on.
Currently I respond to a good number of comments on my blog but it is something I enjoy.
I like your method Rick, it’s exactly what I did in my early days too. I really love the comments here and I reply to every single one (Even now when I get a lot of comments, I still try to)
But there is definitely a point where it becomes unmanageable and you need to bring in some tools to help out. The problem is that all of these tools, by their very nature, have the possibility of “false positives”, where they annoy a legitimate user. I wish that weren’t the case though :(
I am a newbie to the area of blogging. So I just recently started commenting on blogs more often. Before I started blogging, having to sign up to comment was very annoying. It still is. Occasionally having to enter in CAPTCHA is not that bad. I can see how it would get very annoying if you did it a lot. Some of my blogging friends have a check box to confirm that you are a real person.
I admit, I have CAPTCHA on my site right now because I was getting a lot of spam. Once I put CAPTCHA on, it stopped. I don’t get it anymore. Maybe it stops some from commenting? I’m not sure. It is better than nothing.
What really annoys me though is that there are so many different ways to confirm that you are not a spammer. For one person I do CAPTCHA, for another it is the check mark, for another I have to use a google login, for another facebook, for another twitter. Can we get a standard?
Polite messages at the bottom of the post is nice for those who follow rules, but as someone said earlier in the comments, I don’t think spammers care and they will say what they want.
I have never heard of the DoFollow plugin. My WordPress is setup that I have to approve the comment and then once you have been approved once, then you can comment all you want without me having to approve you again. I can usually catch spammers that way. My problem was though when I was very brand new and didn’t recognize that it was spam because I was so happy to get a comment. Then it kept spamming me until I used the CAPTCHA plugin.
I understand your thoughts on wanting one standardized approach Caren. It’s definitely a hassle having to read through each one carefully. Even the fact that there are so many types of captchas can get annoying. :(
I think the reason there is no standard though is that a lot of these solutions work because of their uniqueness. As soon as one method gets popular, the spambots break that and have access to everyone. But with 100 different tools, they have to break 100 separate tools. It’s much more complicated.
Thanks for your detailed comment here btw, really enjoyed reading it :)
Dear all,
If you want to have just quality comments, just delete the spam ones. The comments can not themselves appear in your post, they must wait for your moderation and you have to read all as you are ladies and gentlemen and you can not ignore what others are trying to share with you. While you are reading, you are choosing.
Get the most even just do the least. Need not to be so serious with many “barriers” like that.
Regards,
Fifi
Hey :)
That definitely works on smaller sites, but we have over 17,000 published comments here. It’s just too many to moderate manually.
I’m not so keen on comments requiring moderation on any site though. I know it is sometimes necessary (too many links etc.), but if it takes the blogger even a day or more to approve them, then it’s too late. The time for conversation has passed.
What an awesome post. I have Captcha and for some reason I’m getting spam through. I never used to so I wonder if WordPress made a change some how.
On a personal note, I am a rubberstamp blogger, and talked about my home electrical issues. Well, if there wasn’t an electrical spammer. Go figure.
Haha, I know that feeling Beth! If I can say one thing, don’t ever write a post about printing or ink supplies, you’ll be tortured! :P
From my experience removing DoFollow doesn’t really help. What’s more effective for fighting spam is never being DoFollow in the first place. I used DoFollow in the early days of my blog for the same reasons that you have used it here, but after a few months I got rid of it. By that time my blog was already on a number of DoFollow lists and even now a few years later I still get traffic from those lists and comments from spammers who assume that the blog is still do follow. I’ve seen Mr. Wart Removal at my blog several times. I was able to get my blog removed from a few of those lists, but not all.
Hey Steven :)
That makes a lot of sense. The damage has already been done then. I wish I’d taken it off this site sooner. I’ve had it on for years now. Not even going to begin trying to get it off the lists its gathered in that time. :(
Going to add the link to this comment to the post, thanks!
I recently shifted my commenting to intense-debate. After reading this post i am going to discontinue use intense-debate as i need to use dofollow for my blog. also i am going to use Jetpack Gravatar Hovercard that is not possible with intense-debate
The hovercard should make its way onto Intense Debate sooner or later. Both Jetpack and Intense Debate are run by Automattic, so it can’t be too long!
I think any site that has Captcha for comments is simply not worth commenting. Specially if I am a regular user. Not too long ago someone came up with a JavaScript solution. So this JS script shows to all users that has JavaScript enabled. And it is checked on already. Basically that just says
“I am Human or something like that” … this also keeps spam away because most bots don’t have JS enabled.
I’ve been wondering about that kind of solution. I’ve read up a good few people suggesting it (Or variations of it, e.g. add a box that humans can’t see. Then if it’s filled out when the form it submitted, you’ll know it was a bot)
Would be curious to try it out and see its effectiveness. Definitely quite a simple trick compared to others!
This is an interesting idea, I did something similar to this but for a contact form on my company website. We required people to fill out this form to request a demo of the software, however we would get 100’s of Spam emails. So I put in an input field gave it a name like “job_title” and then used css to hide it. My idea was if it was a bot it would auto populate all fields with something and could be denied, real people visiting would not see the field and it would be blank.
We no longer get any Spam from that contact form.
Interesting discussion.
I agree with others who suggest a ‘standard’ to follow.Captcha can be such a put-off depending on the system used.
I do not think people should have to have Twitter and/or Facebook in order to comment.
I like the ‘vote for comments/recommend’ idea in order to push better comments, that add to the post/tutorial discussion, up the page ..and maybe pushing the comments that just say ‘thanks’ further down (valuable feedback and welcome though they are)….mixing them up is, I find ,somewhat irritating. Thanks Michael for such a great blog.
No problem Mike, thanks for taking the time to leave your thoughts!
I’d love it if we could find some sort of standardized solution, but I’d worry that that does just make it easier for spammers. They only have one security fence to crack then.
There’s definitely something to be said for security through obscurity. Sometimes the best anti-spam tool is just the one that no-one else is using, so no spammer has bothered to crack.
Nice article… I’ve found that depending on your market the real commenter’s don’t normally have Websites. So what I do is remove the URL field and I blacklist http and href. It greatly helps reduces spam, it doesn’t stop it, but it puts it down to a crawl.
Actually, I do this on every site now. For me it’s easier to add everything back later than it is to deal with the spam while the site builds up.
That’s not the best idea for all sites but for others it works like a champ.
That’s an interesting approach Chris, not something I’d even considered! For a site like this, where just about everyone has their own site, it wouldn’t be an option. For others, like you said, it may not be an issue at all then, hmm…
Well i’d want to reward good comments / followers with dofollow and I like your idea that three approved comments gets the no follow removed. Just need to eliminate the spam!
I think we could make a nice plugin here with a few cool features:
1. In my blog i’ve noticed most of the spammers don’t have a Gravatar – how about allowing comments to be be put in the spam folder automatically where there is no Gravatar?
2. Also the list of highly suspect spam words is a good one – have a list of suggested filter words with the option of adding new spam words which cause the comment to be put in the spam folder.
3. Also include an option to auto spam the comment where the name is more than three words long as this is probably spam i.e. Web Design Texas
4. Another option might be to include a mandatory email confirmation for first time posters. When the commentator validates the comment is made live.
I think we could quite easily create a simple points system algorithm to estimate whether a comment is span or not. i.e. is there a Gravatar? Is there more than three words in the name field? Are there links in the comment body? Is this the first comment? etc etc
Hi Kevin, thanks for the great comment!
I’ve noticed the same thing here about the Gravatars. When I’m scanning over the “spam” section of my comments, actually having a Gravatar is one of the things that makes me stop and check that comment.
I think a plugin like that could work very well. The only trouble is, as always, the false positives. I know most people do have Gravatars, but not everyone (Even on a tech-savvy audience like this one, e.g. Caren and Chris above both left great comments, but no Gravatars)
The word counter on names is an interesting one definitely! I like that approach :)
I had a lot of trouble on my personal blog with spam. Right now I use IntenseDebate and the WP-SpamFree plugin. Just IntenseDebate did not catch everything, so I started using the plugin. I still get some spam, but it’s not very much at all, well within the “manually deleting” option. Now, I’ve not been very active on my blog, so that may influence it, but it works for me now.
Anything like a CAPTCHA is a big turn off for me, though I might deal with it anyway. FB and Twitter wouldn’t really thrill me (FB moreso, because I use it for more personal things). Disqus and IntenseDebate are fine with me, because it’s a system specific to commenting and you do receive “points” for commenting.
I did like the article, I’ll have to look over my spam defenses again after reading this.
Well, I have to say I only use akismet for right now. I am new to blogging and don’t have too many followers yet (it’s sad I know) but I enjoy my blog. I hate when I come across captchas, but if I really want to type something I will do the captcha word. It’s just irritating when I get it wrong. I’m sure I will someday need something more than akismet, but my blog is only a few weeks old. I think that maybe looking out for the ‘keywords’ would probably be a best bet, but I’m still kind of new to blogging, but I am enjoying it :)
other then “Closing Comments after a While” all other steps are good to ensure valuable, meaningful comments and keep spammers at bay
We removed do follow and it as amazing how many spammers just want away are saw no worth in commenting. I personally think that DoFollow is the way to go because it helps your readers learn more and more about each other, we just had too big of problem.
I totally agree with you, im running a little Weblog in germany and i can see the same Problem, but i dont think to remove the dofollow attribute is a solid answer to this guys.
I Think a Comment-Spammer is always a problem, i hope that WordPress will increase the skills of Alisamet to prevent this guys to publish their crap.
Hi, nice post.
I believe that there isn’t a single miracle solution to get rid of spam and create a simple and nice environment for commenters to post.
I decided a while back to use Disqus, but I think it may have decrease a bit the casual commenters participation, since it’s a bit different from what they are used to see in blogs.
Anyway, I also think it’s always worth it to try new approaches and evaluate the results and feedback form the community.
Good luck in your quest :)
Joao
great post, i think this is a big problem for the most Blog-Publishers and it has to be solved
Interesting article Michael ;-) Personally I think the ‘after 3 comments’ rule wouldnt work, you would still get the same people coming back until they have reached the magic 3 comments.
I dont like the idea of only being able to write a comment using social media. I also find it rather irritating when comments are closed just because I have not found the article within a certain date of publishing.
The best ideas in my opinion would be a thumbs up thumbs down or 5 star rating system. This way you could just thumbs down the bad posters. I dont find the capacha that annoying. Good luck making the right decision. :)
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Hi Martin,
This post actually got me thinking a bit on what comment system I’d like to deploy on my intended blog.
For my part, no CAPTCHAS for sure. It’s just a deterrent to engagement.
Also, would love to see that tutorial you mentioned come out…I’d deploy it for sure. Would you consider raw code rather than a plugin approach?
Hi,
I think that this is the same problem that most high traffic blogs have. I think captcha’s or wordpress plugins paired of with vigilant moderation is your best bet to weed out unrelated and spam comments. Removing comments for a while would really have a negative effect as user experience wouldn’t be the same so I wouldn’t suggest that. Anyways, good luck to your problem. Keep us updated if ever you find something that works. I’m sure every blogger would love to hear it! :)
I really like this article and through comments many problems are solved.
Think that visitors hate captcha so I’ve installed Akismet instead. I totally agree and like your way of thanking commenting visitors by removing the nofollow attribute, it attracts more visitors to your site too.
Thanks Kev again for the detailed article.
I hate CAPTCHAs, I don’t comment if a CAPTCHA is needed.
A friend of mine has/had a blog with moderated comments, except that people with OpenID could get automatically approved. A lot of places provide OpenID, so it’s quite likely that commenters have some sort of OpenID even if they don’t know about it (which is a problem). For example Google provides one, although they’ve taken the “screw standards, we know Better”-method again and use e-mail-like format instead of regular HTTP-urls, which is more or less incompatible with existing OpenID-implementations.
More original idea I came up with is good ol’ (ne’?) Jabber. I help running a forum that requires admin to approve all new members since majority of new accounts we get is spammers. I enabled Jabber few weeks ago because I had nothing better to do and because I think Jabber is under-utilizied in PhpBB3-installations, so now I’ve been getting “new member”-notitifications to my GTalk (-> my mail, too, when I’m offline… Some stay in the GTalk’s “offline delivery”-queue, I still haven’t figured out the logic). While annoying at first, I got used to it and after making it also give new users’ e-mail-addresses in the notification-message, I’ve managed to activate new accounts in less than a minute.
Tl;dr: Make your blog talk Jabber/XMPP, enable “moderate all new comments” (okay, it may drive away some commenters), send all new comments with an activation-link to your Jabber/GTalk/LJTalk/…, ???, profit.
For those of you using WordPress, the Akismet has a free version, and I’ve been using it for about a week now, and this week no spam got through, it’s doing it’s job perfectly.
Hehe and I agree with some of the commenters above, I hate captcha’s too.
One of my sites use wordpress and when I last logged in a week or so after not logging in after a month or so I had more than 200 pending comments and all of them were spam. It is extremely of putting to write new material on that blog because of this.
I do agree with the first post by Natalia Ventre. Although Captcha codes do work it can be extremely annoying not only when you can not read the darn things but when you would have bet $100 that you know you typed it correctly and it says try again. Arrrgghhh!!
Captcha is a double-edged, dull sword. It will discourage those who are legit and not really keep the bad guys/gals out. The best and most permanent approach would be to close comments after a couple of months and if there is a specific technical detail relevant to the industry that may need to be updated at some point, then you can solicit feedback through a separate short form on the site. Great information here.
I use captcha a lot to prevent robots spam my comment. In wordpress, I also use Akismet to help me prevent spam comments. It is very effective.
Nice article Michael. I only use Akismet and i hate Captcha’s too.
I don’t use captcha and askimet but i found discuss comments very effective on my blogs, captcha will still get you spam and askimit will only prevent when used the paid version, askimet sometimes marks good comments as spam. I am happy with disquss.
I implemented captchas on one of my blogs and it reduced spam down to almost 100%! Overall valid commenting suffered to the same degree.
I like the idea of being able to mark a comment as ‘good’ and having that comment styled the same or similar as the authors.
I implemented the facebook comments plugin on our blog. I haven’t ever turned comments “on” due to the issue of having to monitor the spam, but after much debate within our marketing group – we are going for it. We do share your thought that the tie to FB will reduce potential spam although not entirely.
I hate to enter captchas but as sites owner i like to place captcha against spammers :)
Excellent post, thanks for putting the do-follow issue out there. Our company runs hundreds of internal and client blogs and we find only about 15-20% more SEO spam on do-follow sites across a wide range of niches and demographics.
For those of you using WordPress, the Akismet has a free version, and I’ve been using it for about a week now, Mike Green Jersey and this week no spam got through, it’s doing it’s job perfectly.
Thanks for explaining about the way to get quality comments
Maybe a anti spam like Akismet is a good option too.
Hi Martin,
I was able to control all the Spam comments in my blog, but i am unable to control trackbacks, Since I use Thesis I have disable trackbacks, and installed Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin, it date I am happy spam comment are out.
But the Id of comment Vote is an excellent, the top good post get to stay on top and other are hidden, I love reading posts and well as comments some we find answers via comments and they require the top priority to stay up.
If have any Id on stopping track back from your side will be helpful for us.
Thanks for sharing this awesome post.
-Imran
it is good of you help us
I really appreaciate your thoughts here and consider some points you have here.
I really dont like Only Comment Via FB Connect and Twitter for blogs and whatnot… y? well i find it to complicated, i need to login some where else just to post a blog comment. Im i lazy or what? what do u think do u agree or disagree with me?
The biggest problem I find is human spammers they can create intelligent posts and a captcha has no effect in stopping them, is there a free spam filter you can add repeat offender too? That would be ace!
I hate using captacha. Just a check box is enough to prevent spammers to some extent. Highlighting good comments would really motivate readers to make informative comments. That’s a good idea. Start it soon Michael.
i am using WordPress for my blog and Akismet works just perfect for me, thanks for this awesome post and really helpful comments above.
I hate the Capatha too, and also moderating :P Akismet is a great tool!
This is one of the great blogs I’ve read today. Your site contains lots of good information and I’m sure many people will like it as I do. I would like to give this site a thumb up rating. Keep up the good works guys. I think I’m going to come back to this site regularly. Thanks.
Some good ideas except the captcha. I hate those things. It doesn’t seem to be working though. This comment thread is littered with spam. The comment right above mine is a perfect example… and I know I didn’t use my real name either, but I never do :)
I love this idea, in my part I like reading comments. But there are comments that are annoying and irritating. Capcha is needed for the security, I don’t necessary agree regarding the “comment form” better to have this one. Thanks for sharing!
Some good ideas except the captcha
Nice Article, thanks for sharing this at v7n forum.. see u de!
I should filter the name like ‘mortgage’, ‘seo’ and what so ever weird name comments.
I was searching for difference between dofollow and nofollow and found the right information here. I have too changed my blog to a dofollow blog.
thanks for the nice information.
with regards,
pradeep
Now i get it!!!
its doFollow all the way for us!!!
nice one
Ha – Alex beat me too it. I love the idea of dofollow, but you’re right – it also draws in more spam. And thats a very good idea to have a ‘featured comment’ section. Like even a simple check box in the WP backend for the comments section. If you find a plugin that does this, let me know!
Amazing! thank for advice.
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I think that Closing Comments after a While is the best way to stop spammers.
Well, I have to say I only use akismet for right now. I am new to blogging and don’t have too many followers yet (it’s sad I know) but I enjoy my blog. I hate when I come across captchas, but if I really want to type something I will do the captcha word. It’s just irritating when I get it wrong. I’m sure I will someday need something more than akismet, but my blog is only a few weeks old. I think that maybe looking out for the ‘keywords’ would probably be a best bet, but I’m still kind of new to blogging, but I am enjoying it :)
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Thanks
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I’m probably a few months late. I have a blog too not that good like this but the thing is that I change it to nofollow and I still receiving spammers. I tried a few things and the then i turned again to dofollow but I put a spam plugin that is free and all the comments now have to wait for approvals. Everyday I have to deny a dozens of comments. This blog is doing good, is PR5 and the quility is fine.
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This is one of my problems with my blogs. I receive a lot of spam which are certainly annoying. Anyway, thanks to this tips of yours. I hope this will lessen the number of people spamming my blogs.
it is good of you help us
nice info and this is very useful for the people who are new in this field.
This is very good for me!
Thank you! These articles are a god send for my clients. Keeps them happy and spam free, plus gives me more time to to do the stuff we were trained to do.
cheers
Very much helpful topic sir,i like that and i want to say that i am totally agree with you.
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I really like this article and through comments many problems are solved and i very thankful for this,,,,,,,,,,
“The trouble is that after a day or two of an article being live, the spammers descend and the lovely, informative comment thread descends into “great article, agree with your points, visit my site”. It’s just not cool…”
Hahahaha… couldn’t agree more!
This article annoying captcha.. and me hate CAPTCHA too!!
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Integrating comments from Facebook& disqus will help really a lot.Thanks for the nice post
great description of interweaving of FB and a blog commenting plugin
I sometimes read your blog, if you can, please post new stuff more often :D
I have been blogging from years never found a blog having some good wise advice like this.
Spot on with this write-up, I truly assume this website needs far more consideration. I’ll most likely be again to read much more, thanks for that info.
Appreciate the recommendation. Let me try it out.
Thank you Michael for your post.
I started a blog at 2010 and only blog for several month then I stopped for personal reason. But I guess since it’s a popular subject and I did have some unique content. The visitors increased slowly without me maintenance it for about a year. Since my intention to start my blog was to only express myself with the story I experienced from interrical relationship. I didn’t work on any communication with my readers and I had over 100 thousands of the spam comments in my site I need to take care of when I decided to blogging again. Since there were too much, the first thing I did was to delete all of them including some quality comments through the year. Now I am facing a problems after I started to post again. The only comments I have on my site are only spams, so I have to closed my comment before I finish the site upgrade (I and working on add a forum). I admit it’s my bad to not respond my readers at the first place. Now I want to do somthing defferent, but I am not so active in social median. Do you have any suggestion about how to fix my comment’s problem?
By the way, I did try to add some questions at the end of my article, but still, only spams responds…
Thank you very much for your help and hope you have a great day.
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