Why I Don’t Do Much to Prevent Comment Spam
Spam is a big problem these days, it’s gone from my inbox to my blog, to my MySpace, to my Twitter, my stats, and now even my Mint stats. Luckily, we’ve been given a lot of options for combating it, albeit with caveats.
A lot of bloggers opt for the captcha route, those blobby groupings of letters and numbers even humans have a hard time understanding. Some people moderate all their comments. Others require you fill out an extra field with a question a robot wouldn’t be able to answer. I don’t do any of this. Comment spam is my problem, not my readers’. I want interacting with me and my site to be as easy as possible, so I’m not going to add an extra step to the equation.
Granted, I don’t get 10,000 hits a day so I’m not battling comment spam on the same level as a lot of other people. But that makes it all the more important I keep my site as human as possible. I won’t even comment on a Blogger hosted blog because I have to register an ID with their service. I don’t want an alienating experience like that for my new readers. I use Akismet, and while it doesn’t get everything, it gets a lot. I will continue to moderate comments mostly manually, because this is my burden, and I care enough about my readers that I don’t mind taking the time.
I did read an interesting article today that touches on something I’ve been hearing about lately, which is the notion of adding an additional field and hiding it with CSS. Then you set your CMS to flag comments filling out this field as spam.
