Archer Web Solutions - Hit the target every time!

Earlier this week on our twitter account, I mentioned a pet peeve of mine -external links that don't open in a new tab/window. That got me to thinking about my other web design peccadilloes.  One thing that infuriates me is a spam comment.

I use Jom Comment on my blog and I have it set up so that I get an email message every time someone comments on an article I write. Seeing that someone has commented can be kind of exciting... until I discover that the comment is nothing but spam. I didn't create my blog to let other people sell loans, fake Rolexes, college essays or porn. Mainly because I don't write about these things anyway and because I don't think my audience is interested either.

I've taken some steps to fix this and it's worked for me. Some people, like Blogging Pro disagree with this, but you can reduce the number of spam on Jom Comment significantly by doing the following:

Require captcha inputs when readers submit comments. Some blog software includes this functionality, some don't. MyBlog/Jom Comment for Joomla does and it works pretty well. Some believe this discourages legitimate commenting, but that's a risk I'll take to decrease the valuable time I spend removing "Guaranteed A+ College Essays" from my knitting blog. I might be swayed to remove Captcha to see if my spam continues to stay low to non-existent. I'll keep you posted.

Block the IP addresses of those individuals who leave spam comments.
Spammers can't comment when they can't access your comment system. Each comment has an IP address associated with it. You can click "Block IP" straight from the comment and delete it. If this didn't work, then I would still be getting spam comments, which have dropped off entirely since I've implemented this change.

Block certain words from your comments.
This shouldn't be a problem if your blog isn't about the crap that spammers are trying to sell. Plus Jom Comment will only flag the comment and keep it unpublished for you to review later. I'd be impressed if someone was able to tie discount home loans to knitting in a legitimate way. Simply input the words you want refused in the configuration section of Jom Comment.

Block domains from your comments.
Use the same area in Jom Comment where you block specific words to also block the domains and email addresses of your spammers.

Delete spam comments promptly.
The less time they spend on your blog, the better. If you don't remove them it makes your blog look like it's not updated in a timely fashion.

Blogging Pro has more to say on this -and some great tips.