In my recent post where I shared the strategy that helped me reach over 180 RSS subscribers even on being inactive for 21 days, I also told you how I managed to bring in so many comments to the previously published Useful and Popular blog posts. Like they say, the good and the bad always come together – A lot of comment spam also found its way, into the Akismet trap though! There were about 200 spam comments awaiting moderation and some of them could be genuine so I decided to go through each page.

Only a few pages past, I started seeing some racist comments that seemed to make no sense. It makes (non) sense to see that spammers try to sell Viagra and other drugs through comments because in some cases they may lure some hot-blooded humans into clicking through the links, or even buy them. But what do the racist comments intend to do? Why do people want to spread racial discrimination and mess with anyone’s religious or social sentiments? We are living in the 21^st century and the world is changing for the better. Why would anyone want to be a disrespected racist?

Who’s behind all this? I was in such a fury to see all those comments there and deleted them before scanning the rest of them. I didn’t wish (and didn’t care) to visit the included links to see who made those comments, but one thing is very clear – whosoever did that manually or through spam bots – is a sore loser, a person with no social or moral values, who has probably been kicked out of home or society for doing no good but only swearing and fighting.

And even if this is the case… what does it mean to spam the cleaner places on the web? Blogs are a media of free expression and people have used them to vent their frustrations in the virtual world to relieve themselves in their real life. But these spammers need to know their limits. It is better if such things are kept to oneself because such things are not acceptable in a civilized society, and not to the slightest extent in the blogosphere. If any spammer happens to read this post, pay special attention to the following words – Blogging and Racism don’t go together!

By making racist comments, you’re doing yourself no good. No such comments would ever be approved and all you would earn is lots of swearing.

From the wikipedia, Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. Spam in blogs (also called simply blog spam or comment spam) is a form of spamdexing.

It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards. Any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by visitors may be a target. Adding links that point to the spammer’s web site artificially increases the site’s search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer’s commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers.

SPAM at Inspirit:

I get more than a 100 spam comments in a day, that are generally caught up by the Akismet plugin for WordPress, that I have been using ever since I started Inspirit.  Whatever comment spam managed to trick the plugin and got published till now was easily detected and marked spam, manually. This is because spam comments are generally meaningless, unrelated to the content of your blog or website and contain a hell of links. If that not be the case, the website URL and/or the email address filled by the spam bot (or the manual spammer, whatever!) is stupid enough to get them caught. If you see an email address such as lxcwyro@owksm.com, you can be certain that it is spam.

Here’s a preview of some kind of spam I get everyday:

• Large number of links
• Weird, grammatically screwed up and totally irrelevant content of the comment
• Mention of large number of illegal drugs
• Weird Name of the Commentator in both the comments
• Different Email addresses but same website

… are some of the many indications that any particular comment on your blog is actually a spam comment.

SPAM getting smarter than it ever was:

But, what I faced today was entirely different from what I was already known to. Prior to this blog entry, I had written a post about Some Radical Changes at Inspirit to which I received a comment that looked so genuine that I even marked it as not-spam from the Akismet panel.

What part of the first comment (by Eric Hundin) looks like spam to you? The comment by Mr.Eric Hundin is written in perfect English and it seems like he is quite familiar with blogs, blogging services and terminology. Even the email and website address posted by the URL looked perfectly genuine! It was in the form: www.somewebsitename.com and mail@somewebsitename.com !

I visit everyone who takes time to comment at Inspirit and if it interests me, drop a comment as well. Well, I visited Eric Hundin too. Here is what I saw:

Remarkable design, remarkable content, all valid and sound! This website also had a neatly arranged blogroll, link to blog’s RSS and everything you’ll look for in something that you call a blog. Then, what makes me tell you that this comment was no more than spam!

Actually, beyond the footer, the site carried a three links. These three links were to some casino site, property deals site and poker places! I felt a sense of insecurity for the first time and reviewed the blogroll again. Then I noticed three more links at the end of the blogroll that said:

    * sell endowment
* Adult and Children Halloween Costumes
* Email Reply Template Software

 Well, this was a hint enough, and I tried a few other genuine looking links from the blogroll! And there it was! All the blogs were similarly remarkable in their design and content. But they were all almost same in structuring and layout. A display image at each of them in the sidebar, a neat and tidy blogroll, these three links at the end of the sidebar and beyond the footer as well. Also, all the links in the sidebars were to the same websites excluding the blog that carried the links. They were just shuffled up or down at each blog.

I returned to Inspirit and marked the comment as spam before blinking once more!
Amazing! I would not have not known about this blog or any other as spam had not I chanced by those links. And after reading the content on the blog, I was in quite a mood to leave a comment as well.

Spam is getting smarter than it ever was! I hope to see anti-spam measures evolving as fast as Spam is going to prevent all the trouble to publishers, advertisers and genuine content makers!

Comment moderation is a feature offered by most of the blogging platforms that allows you to prevent comments from appearing on your site without your express approval.

What do many bloggers think?

I know many bloggers around (I mean bloggers…) who almost consider enabling comment moderation, a principle. I talked to a few of such people and collected the reasons they give for enabling comment moderation.

• To prevent Comment-Spam
• To prevent displaying abusive comments
• To control the comments that speak against the idea presented in their posts

I had stumbled upon a blog a few days ago that emphasized that you should enable comment-moderation on your blog and make it a habit to regularly approve the comments from the moderation queue.

What do I think?

• I agree that comment moderation helps a lot in filtering out comment spam. Comment Spam is indeed a hated devil!
• I also agree that you can dis-approve abusive comments and get rid of them. Abusing is not one of the blogger-traits. Its really important that the commentator should mind his tongue and tone while commenting. By abusing, you’ll never be defaming the blog-author but only bringing yourself a bad name, from the supporting readership that may include people/bloggers you know well. Certainly not a healthy thing to do.
• I disagree that you should moderate the comments to filter out and dis-approve those comments that speak against the idea presented in your post. If you practice this, then your blog is not a blog but a personal website.

The essence of blogging is lost in one-way communication. Even if you believe that you are God, always bear in mind that there are atheists who don’t believe you. Also, the objective of criticism in comments at your blog is just getting into a discussion and extracting an optima out of it & not degrading you. Learn How to Respond to the Comments on your Blog effectively and try to take them as positively as you can.

But the point is,

Should You Enable Comment Moderation on Your Blog?

I have jotted down 4 main reasons why (I think) comment moderation should not be enabled on your blog:

1. Everyone knows how to use Delete function. If you monitor your blog regularly for new comments and/or are notified about new comments on your blog via email, then you should be able to remove irresponsible spammy comments in a little time from when they are posted.
2. If you approve comments from the moderation queue once or twice in a day, then its likely that during the time when the comments are held in moderation queue your visitors might miss a discussion that could have otherwise sparked up from an interesting idea or a form of criticism posted in a comment.
3. You can, by mistake, delete or dis-approve a genuine comment while bulk-moderating. And a commentator may form a negative impression by this unintended gesture. Instead, you can delete the abusive or irresponsible comments when they are displayed on your blog. The visitors who might have seen such comments on your blog will appreciate not seeing that content later on.
4. Only those bloggers use comment moderation to dis-approve comments that speak against the idea conveyed in their posts, who lack originality and fear getting exposed.

What do you think about this matter: Comment Moderation? Do you use comment moderation for holding up comments till you manually approve them or let all the comments appear on your blog but monitor them regularly and keep cleaning them up as soon as you spot a blot! Share your views, opinions and experiences with the rest of us reading this. Feel free to drop a comment and subscribe to the RSS feed to stay updated with the latest posts at Inspirit.