Spam Prevention

Is there a way to limit spam without using word verification or comment moderation in Blogger blogs?

I recently had to suspend anonymous comments on my blog to deal with this.

A group of us have started a group blog and we don't want to limit interaction with our readers nor use either the word verification or comment moderation. Thanks!

This Post was written by Sra from When My Soup Came Alive.

Another type of comment spam

I'm glad I chose to put my blog on comment moderation - now it appears that companies are paying people to pretend to be bloggers. The post read something like "That recipe looks really good, I'm in a rut as to types of pasta dishes to fix in addition to my go to pasta recipes." The italicized words "go to pasta recipes" was a link - to a Disney Family recipe page. The name of the person leaving the comment was also a link, but to a person who doesn't even have a blog but registered with Blogger so she could post as if she did. If I hadn't clicked on her name, I wouldn't have seen that. My guess is that she is paid by Disney to put their links on people's blogs.


This Post was written by Cyndi from Cookin' With Cyndi

This Post was written by Joanna from Joanna's Food


Can anyone tell me how to disable comments in an individual post in blogger? I don't want to disable all comments, just on one or two archive posts that attract staggering amounts of inappropriate diet-related advertising type comments ....

Thanks
Joanna

Just a guy named Yuri

This morning I woke up to the following comment on one of my recipes:

IP Address: 193.239.152.85
Name: Food for Heaven. Cooking recipes
Email Address: sally@foodforheaven.com
URL: http://www.foodforheaven.com
Comments:

I've made this soupe today and was really impressed. It was perfect!
Thanks for your tasty recipe!

Cooking is also my hobby, so we are kind of tasty-friends :)

I almost always check the URLs of comments before they post, and sure enough, this one turned out to be an aggregator, using content from my site and Kalyn's.

The nerve! First throwing up a Wordpress site with our feeds, and then leaving comments on my site to promote it?

When I demanded that Sally take down my content, I got this from "Sally Moore":

Hello, Elise.

I thought it would be great for you to have your recipes on my website. I added link to your website after every recipe, so people could read the whole entry at elise.com
But if you don't want to promote your website this way, it's your choice. Food for Heaven is becoming a great portal.

I won't post your materials anymore. I thought you're kind of woman who prefer friendship and collaboration. I was wrong.

Yeah, right. Turns out in the long header of the email, it was actually sent by a guy named "Yuri Zakharov", confirmed when I got another email from Yuri himself with the same IP address.

So, just a warning to everyone, the sneaky aggregators are trying to promote their stolen goods on our own sites, leaving happy, friendly comments from people with happy, friendly names.

If you've received any comments recently from FoodForHeaven, you should know that it's just a guy named Yuri who thinks we are stupid enough to buy into it.


This Post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes

Spam?

I got no less than 5 comments from a blogger called 'Mr' last night. That's not a bad thing, obviously, as I love comments. But it's a bit different, as all five comments are identical:

"I think u got a great blog!! Thank u for that. I'm definitely going to add u to my favorite :) I hope you can visit mine. It's about Copycat Recipes.
Uncover the Secret Recipes from Your Favorite Restaurants!
Easily Prepare the Most Guarded Restaurant Recipes in Your Own Kitchen.
The same tastes and flavors for a fraction of the cost! Learn to cook the highly guarded secrets behind dishes from: » Red Lobster » Applebee's » Chili's » Olive Garden » T.G.I. Fridays » Outback Steakhouse » Starbucks » +700 recipes from other most Famous Restaurants.
http : // copycatcookbook (dot) blogspot (dot) com
There's new 5 recipes each day!!"

I thought it's spam, but there seems to be a genuine person behind the blog, who replies to the comments that some people have left him after he commented on their site. It might be just his peculiar way to promote his blog, as he only began few months ago. I maybe wouldn't mind if the person left just one comment, but 5?!? During 10 hours?

What would you do? Simply delete the comments? Email to the named blogger and ask him not to do so (there's no email given though)? What if he continues to do it (he already left that comment a few days ago)?

This Post was written by Pille from Nami-nami

[Tech + Spam] Captcha + alternatives

Hi all,

We're publishing using WordPress, and we've had great success with Akismet for spam-comment filtering. But a handful of spam comments slip through each day, and I worry about the implications of having close to 60,000 comments in our database (even though 99.9% of them are tagged as spam). At this rate/capacity I fear we're taxing the limits of what WordPress was designed to handle.

I've shied away from Captcha and other verification methods in the past, because I don't want to put up any barriers for our readers to comment. But I'm sick to death of dealing with the spam comments, and I realize more and more that nearly every site where I comment has some form of user validation in place. Maybe my readers won't balk as much as I fear?

I'd love to hear from any of you who've added Captcha to your site about how it affected your (legitimate) comment rates. And also, any Captcha alternatives that you've used and liked -- I know I've seen sites that ask commenters to enter a simple check-phrase, but I can't seem to remember where.

Thanks!
~A


This Post was written by Anita from Married... with Dinner