Thursday 25 October 2012

Anonymous commenting is off

Hey all,

I've had to turn anonymous commenting off. I just received four spam comments within two minutes and that's pretty much the last straw for me. I have been getting multiple notifications a day about spam comments, all anonymous, and it's just got to be too much. Blogger is very good at identifying them as spam, so they never get published but the constant email notifications are tiresome.

So. From now on, if you want to comment, you will no longer be able to do so anonymously. I'm sorry to the legitimate commenters this will affect but I hope you won't let it stop you from leaving a comment if you'd like to. It doesn't take long to sign up for a Blogger or Wordpress account (these are probably the two easiest ways of commenting) and there's no reason you actually have to use the blog for anything. I have a Wordpress blog I only ever use for commenting. :)

Once again though, I'm sorry for any inconvenience this might cause. Blame the spammers. ;)

6 comments:

  1. Thankfully, I only get spam comments occasionally, and that without having word verification or any other protective measure in place. Sorry to hear you've had to deal with so much of it!

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    1. Turning the word verification back on would probably help in my case but when it was on, legitimate commenters were having issues getting their posts to go through. Ugh! So this was the only solution, unfortunately. I haven't had any spam comments since yesterday, so it may have done the trick.

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  2. Maybe it's just me, but I just don't get there people! If you don't like a blog just leave it, you don't have to comment! Nobody forces you to read and comment!

    It's kind of sad that you were forced to take these kind of actions, but understandable. I haven't had any of these spam-comments, but Sullivan is way better than my blog :)

    I hope it doesn't stop your 'real' anonymous readers from commenting!

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    1. Oh, no, Tanja, these anonymous posters are just spammers - it's all advertising. I don't even think they're real people, because when I happen to check my stats right after I get a spam comment, it looks as if no one's commented at all.

      I did get a nasty comment from an anon about a month ago and I turned comment moderation on for posts older than two weeks after that. She attempted to post SIX more nasty comments but they're just going to sit in the moderation queue forever. I'm not going to give her the attention she wants. But this move was not prompted by her, in any case. :)

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  3. I get a ton of spam comments too, but blogger sends them straight to spam. I don't get notifications about them, so perhaps that makes it less annoying. Maybe you can turn off the notifications. I do check the spam comments once a week since sometimes there are legitimate comments that get routed to spam. I've also seen an ge increase in spam comments in the last two weeks, so maybe something is going on with blogger and spamming robots.

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    1. Eh, I don't really want to turn off the notifications, because I will honestly never remember to check them otherwise! Especially for older posts. When I first turned on comment moderation (only for posts older than two weeks) where the e-mail notification is separate, I had at least two or three comments sitting in the queue for more than two weeks.

      And yes, I've definitely seen more spam than ever in the past fortnight! The amount has been ridiculous, actually!

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