Blog Spam

Recently, Ernie the Attorney disabled comments from his blog. Fortunately, I don't have a visible enough profile to make comment spam a problem. But I did do some digging for possible solutions.

The easiest option (and one that many people take) is to simply disable comments entirely. Personally, I think that is a bit drastic. It kills one of the very features that attracts me to blogs in the first place: exchanging ideas. And even that is not foolproof... if you're using MT, you'll still need to disable the scripts that allow comment posting, or you could still be victimized.

A nicer, more community friendly solution (I think) is to require registration before posting comments. I don't think this discourages legitimate posters, but it certainly stops spam bots.

There are also some creative/scripted options out there. Check these links for more info:

• Jay Allen has the MT-Blacklist for MT users.
• Dive into Mark has some thoughts on ridding spam, and many links to some practical solutions.
• James Seng also has an MT-plugin to help stop spam.

Of course, nothing is fool-proof. But short of approving every comment post (who has that kind of time?!) or disabling comments altogether, registration seems like the best option to me.