Two weeks ago I made a difficult decision to turn off comments on older posts in an attempt to thwart the amount of comment spam I’m receiving. What is comment spam? It’s a comment left on my blog, with the sole purpose that the commenter gets a link back to their site, often with keywords about their product in the link. Nearly every time these are links back to porn, pills, and/or other inhospitable sites. My blog is not a vehicle to advertise these sites, and it’s a gross abuse of the comment system that these businesses attempt to use my blog to gain such an advantage.
Fortunately very few of these comments ever see the live blog, but rather get wrapped up in the spam filters. I prefer that leaving a comment is absolutely as easy to do as I can make it, but at the same time, abusing this system simply cannot be tolerated.
Two weeks ago, my spam totals were getting out of hand. To handle the volume, it was becoming nearly a daily task to sift through the spam to determine if there was anything of worth that was inadvertently marked as spam, lest the task be something large enough I had to find an open slot in my calendar to schedule it.
Accordingly, I painstakingly went to every post that had been written longer than 3 months ago and marked the post as comment/pingback closed. Thus, for these older posts, it is now impossible for anyone to leave a comment. I regret doing this, but the past two weeks data cannot be ignored. Comment spam is down 75%. And honestly, very, very few legitimate comments are left on posts over 3 months old. Sure, they have happened, but it has been exceedingly rare.
I apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you in the future, but I hope you understand. And as always, I encourage everyone that is reading the blog to comment on anything we’ve shared here. Agree or not, your thoughts are always welcome. FYI, I do have a comment policy, in case you are wondering how I determine what is or is not spam.
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