The End of Comments

I have had comments on my blog since I started blogging almost nine years ago. Of course, I didn’t actually get my first comment until some time later, and boy, was that exciting! Although I’m not sure of the exact count, I’ve had somewhere around 25,000 comments through the years. However, comments are no more. … Read more

Spam Can Be Funny

When I posted some funny spam a while back, one of my commenters suggested I do it from time to time. I’m sure your spam is as entertaining as mine is, but not all bloggers make the effort to dig through the junk to find legitimate comments. Lately I have been inundated with spam from people, … Read more

There’s Always a Choice

My last post about spam generated some interesting comments. One commenter suggested that spammers have to spam because they can’t afford to pay for backlinks and have no other way to rank well in the search engines. I totally disagree with that position and wrote a long comment in rebuttal. I got on my soapbox so much I … Read more

A Chuckle from Spam

Does anyone really think I will approve comments like the ones below? The same comments were left a dozen times on different posts using different first names but the same URL, coming from the same IP address. The worst part is that these comments have been cycling through several Web sites. First they’re left by … Read more

Comments, Spam, and Comment Spam

Is it just me or is it getting harder to separate legitimate comments from spam comments? Often legitimate comments are easy to identify. They add relevant  insights, new information, or another opinion on the topic of the post, and they are posted under the commenter’s full name (or least a nickname). Sometimes they simply affirm the commenter’s agreement or encouragement to … Read more

Spam Again …

photo credit: Gauravonomics For some strange reason, I had a few spam-free days when I moved my blog from a subdirectory to the main directory of my Web site. In the previous two years, Akismet had caught 97,000+ spam comments. Then for a day or two i had zero spam comments! Then the spam started … Read more

Success!

After bemoaning the many spam comments on blogs, I downloaded the Akismet plugin for WordPress … and I haven’t had a spam comment since! According to Akismet’s Web site, it is catching more than 600,000 spam comments a day, and 94% of all comments are spam. If your blog is being buried in spam, I recommend … Read more