Filed in archive Spam by Ivy on November 13, 2006

Lorelle, that wonderful blog blogger, has done her best to remind us what is blogging all about: writing and getting comments on our writings. Fearing of spam we have made it as difficult as possible for spam-scripts to plague our comment areas, but with doing so we have also managed to discourage legit readers from leaving their response.

Lorelle thinks that this way spammers in fact win:

"Too often they win by forcing us to make it more difficult for our readers to comment on our blogs. We punish our readers by putting up road blocks and security fences, forcing them to jump through hoops to leave a comment on our blog posts. Fear and the hassles of comment spam is strangling the joy out of the conversation that makes blogs successful and distinctive from websites."

I couldn't agree more. But what to do?

Lorelle says all she needs is a bit of Askimet, a drop of two of Bad Behavior and a dash of Spam Karma. She swears it works like a charm, so do try it out.

Related Entries:

Stop spam in Movable Type blogs - 20 September 2006
Stop form spam - When CAPTCHA is not enough - 09 November 2006
Let me spam you with a bouquet - 13 December 2006
Prefiltering spam - 06 May 2007

« Flickr spam - and a virus... | Main | Google sends out a virus »

Permalink: Stop spam but don't hurt your visitors

Tags: comment spam comment+spam visitors captcha askimet bad+behavior spam+karma stop stop+spam

Trackback: http://publish.creative-weblogging.com/publish/mt-tb.pl/42447

Addthis

Ask

Blinklist

del.icio.us

Digg

Fark

Facebook

Google

Lycos

Ma.gnolia

Mr Wong

Netscape

Netvousz

Newsvine

StumbleUpon

Slashdot

Tailrank

Technorati

Wink

Yahoo

Vote for Stop spam but don't hurt your visitors:

Currently 9.00/10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Rating: 9.00 out of 1 vote(s) cast.

Response from: Small Business Funding (06/04/07 11:50am)

Bad Behavior was designed and built by watching actual spambots which harvested email addresses, posted comment spam, and used fake referrers. By logging their entire HTTP requests and comparing them to HTTP requests of legitimate users, it is possible to detect most spambots. Bad Behavior blocks spambots with a short error message. It also has three configurable User-Agent lists for spambots and other malicious bots which actually identify themselves. Bad Behavior can use string matching or regular expression matching against a User-Agent.

Response from: naughty (06/14/07 7:35am)

I hate being forced to complete n- additional information tabs, enter 50 captcha keys etc.