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July 21, 2008

Better Comment Moderation in Blogger

Blogger doesn't do too much to prevent comment spam. You can enable word verification and annoy your readers, moderate the comments and remove the instant feedback or disable the comments. Until recently, I didn't use any of these options and I manually deleted spam comments one by one, but this becomes excruciating when you have to delete hundreds of comments. So I enabled CAPTCHAs and made it more difficult to post comments.

If you decided that moderating comments is the best way to deal with spam, there's a new option to enable comment moderation only for old posts. I'm not sure if Blogger's default value of 14 days is the best option, but you can change it to any other number. This way your readers will be able to comment on the recent posts without moderation, while the visitors who find older posts using search engines or links from other sites will need to wait until you approve their comments.

Blogger > Settings > Comments

Moderating comments (Blogger can't detect identical comments)


I still think that Blogger needs better tools to filter comment spam and I'm surprised to see that Google can't come up with a real solution like Akismet. The spam filter could also be used in Google Groups, orkut and other community sites.

9 comments:

  1. The problem I have with akismet is not poisoning by spammers, but poisoning by bloggers.

    I am not positive of this, but I believe I have seen one bloggers banning of an ip cause that ip to also be banned at other sites.

    It's one thing for that sort of collaboration to operate on spammers. It's another thing to have it operate on people who comment that merely post a dissent.

    So I would hate to see Google implement anything like that.

    On the other hand, I would love to see statistics on individual sites: how many spams did they get? How many comments total? How many ips did they ban? How many posts did they delete, or did they refuse to post? Do they edit other people's comments? When was the last time the post or a comment was changed?

    There are a lot of bloggers who ruthlessly abuse other bloggers and commenters and a bit of transparency enabled by Google would be greatly appreciated.

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  2. I'm suprised they don't use the same spam filtering system as Gmail does, though clearly it would need some adjustments. Also, the ability to filter via keywords and/or langauge could be good, ie send non-English comments on an blog in english for moderation. Seems to me they already have software to do these jobs elsewhere which could be adapted.

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  3. This is the first time I have noticed U say "I do this" anywhere in your blog. U usually leave it at "This is good"

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  4. I too have enabled verification (I know, I hate CAPTCHAs too!) and comment moderation. The moderation I decided to enable not because of spam, but because of one otherwise legitimate comment that I thought might cause distress to my readers, and I didn't want that to happen. No spam filter is going to deal with that sort of thing, so personally, I'm OK with the facilities Blogger currently provides...

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  5. These HTML tags are permitted: p, b, i, a, and blockquote. A comment may not include more than three links. Participants in this discussion should note the site's

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  6. Great post - thanks!

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  7. I think first that a spam like for mail would work in a very simple way by forcing moderation of comments that look like spam. Also, there might be a black list of phrases to be moderated, like "buy wow gold" or curse words.

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  8. Hi there…!
    i have problem with my blog i cant moderate comments i have changed settings of comments in blogger. i have on comment moderator to ”always” and i have also marked yes for word verification . i changed my template many time but still it publish comment with out letting me know it

    Would you kindly tell me what is the problem plz

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  9. Can we use some plug in which will block the IP addresses which are marked as spam ones I mean this is the most good option if you want to prevent your website from spammers

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