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Fighting Comment Spam

This is your blog public service announcement for today. If you've been a blogger for a while now, you know from first-hand experience that comment spam is becoming a bigger problem in the blogosphere today (it's starting to become a major pain in the you-know-what for our blog). TypePad, our blog hosting service, offers some suggestions for what to do about it here:

http://help.typepad.com/faq/comment_spam.html

Unfortunately, most of these suggestions either place additional burden on bloggers in maintaining their sites or have a negative effect on the user experience of their readers and commenters. Most bloggers want to have as low a barrier as possible for readers to engage them on their site.

If your blog runs on WordPress, there's good news. There's a free WordPress plugin available called Spam Karma that will automatically detect comment spam and prevent them from appearing on your blog. For each new comment made, it uses a number of different criteria to help determine whether it is likely a comment made by a valid user or if it is probably spam. I've been using it on a number of other blogs I maintain for a few months and it's had a 100% success rate so far. If the multitude of features available in the free, open-source WordPress package hasn't convinced you to switch yet, Spam Karma may be the thing that finally pulls you over.

Posted by Peter S. Kim on September 28, 2005 at 03:23 PM | Email this post Permalink

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